The Republic of China’s Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau is investigating how China-based companies poach talent from Taiwan’s tech industry. The prospective employees aren’t told whom they’re really going to be working for. Whether some of them have suspected or guessed the truth, which seems possible, isn’t indicated in the MJIB’s press release (March 28, 2025).
The English-language version of the Ministry’s website reports that the MJIB launched a wide-ranging investigation in December 2024. Their inquiry uncovered illegal recruitment by such companies as SMIC, “China’s largest semiconductor fab [manufacturing plant], ranking second in sales worldwide after TSMC and Samsung”; Shenzhen Torey Microelectronics Technology Co., Ltd., which “specializes in the design and development of driver chips”; and Cloudnix (Shanghai) Technology Ltd., which “specializes in the development of high-end network chips.”
Subterfuge
To recruit tech talent in Taiwan, these and other China-based companies being investigated, perhaps eleven altogether, violated the law by disguising their nature and intentions.
For example, after setting up shop in Taiwan in 2020, Cloudnix “aggressively recruited talent from major global firms such as Intel and Microsoft.” Cloudnix first pretended to be a Taiwanese entity, then a Singaporean one. “Operational funds were transferred from Singapore to sustain illegal business activities in Taiwan, including the recruitment of Taiwanese chip design engineers.”
The Register notes that Shenzhen Torey Microelectronics Technology (what The Register calls Shenzhen Tongrui Microelectronics Technology) “disguised itself so well that Taiwan’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology lauded it as an important innovator and growth company.”
All this matters because the talent is being grabbed at the expense of Taiwanese industry. And because, even worse, “tech developed in Taiwan could be used to help China execute its plans to re-unite with the island.” (Yes—but why is The Register implying acceptance of the CCP pretense that if the mainland forcibly attached Taiwan to itself, this would constitute a “reunion” of Taiwan with the People’s Republic of China?)
Breitbart reports that SMIC, the example first listed above, “was added to the U.S. Commerce Department’s national security ‘entity list’ in December 2020 due to ‘evidence of activities between SMIC and entities of concern in the Chinese military-industrial complex.’ ”
