Geoeconomic Competition and the Realignment of Semiconductor Supply Chains in the Indo-Pacific

초록

As geo-economic competition between the U.S. and China in the Indo-Pacific region intensifies, securing a stable supply chain in strategic key industries became an important issue. In the efforts of restructuring the resilient supply chain in the Indo-Pacific region, the semiconductor industry is emerging as the most critical industry. The Biden administration’s comprehensive supply chain restructuring efforts, both domestically and abroad, offer new opportunities to examine the old debate on state capacity and industrial structure. In the semiconductor industry, which is interconnected by a cross-national production network through horizontal integration, the U.S. is attempting to contain China by weaponizing the chokes points of the core technologies and mobilizing its allies. On the other hand, while fostering national champions, China is also attempting to secure a stable supply of chips by incorporating key semiconductor firms into the China-centered supply chain in exchange for its vast domestic semiconductor consumption as leverage. Currently, in the chip manufacturing sector, individual firms, such as TSMC and Samsung, operate far more resources than the resources available to the governments of both the U.S. and China. In the U.S.-China semiconductor geo-economic competition, thanks to the irreplaceable level of capital and techniques, how incorporating chip manufacturing firms in border countries, such as Taiwan and South Korea, into their supply chains has become a critical issue. In order to understand the characteristics of the ongoing U.S.-China semiconductor competition, we reviewed the U.S.-Japan semiconductor competition in the 1980s as a comparative example. Against this background, this paper asks the following three questions. First, what are the similarities and differences between the recent US-China semiconductor competition with the 1980s US-Japan competition for industrial dominance? Second, what other factors could influence the reorganiza