The national guardian, TSMC, faces a series of personnel storms that verify the "Taiwan disease" and Peng Huai-nan's warning.

In 2024, TSMC faced significant workplace controversies at its Arizona plant in the United States. A group of American employees, including Whites, Latinos, African Americans, and Native Americans, filed a collective lawsuit against the company, accusing TSMC of systemic racial discrimination, including a preference for Taiwanese/Chinese/East Asian employees, mandating the use of Chinese as the working language, which excluded non-native Chinese speakers from effective communication. Some even claimed to have suffered verbal humiliation such as being called “lazy,” “stupid,” and “unable to work,” as well as inappropriate physical contact and sexual harassment. The lawsuit has expanded to include 20 to 30 plaintiffs, with a complaint over 160 pages long, addressing not only discrimination but also management issues related to workplace safety and labor environment. TSMC has denied these allegations, emphasizing that the company never uses nationality or race as criteria for recruitment and promotion, and claiming to have comprehensive diversity policies. However, regardless of the final court ruling, these allegations have revealed the friction TSMC faces in cross-cultural management. When Taiwan's organizational culture is “transplanted intact” to the United States, the diverse employee composition and language differences may become the trigger points for institutional clashes.

In 2025, TSMC's personnel turmoil continued unabated. First, current and former engineers were accused of stealing 2-nanometer advanced process technology, with the case described as concerning “core national technology”; subsequently, it was revealed that veteran employee Luo Weiren, who had served TSMC for over twenty years, allegedly copied confidential documents before retiring and immediately joined competitor Intel, causing a major shock to the public. These incidents not only shook TSMC's internal governance but also exposed the institutional fragility of Taiwan's key technology industries. As an export giant that has long benefited from a relatively low New Taiwan dollar exchange rate, TSMC symbolizes Taiwan's economic model of “maintaining competitiveness through currency.” For many years, the devaluation of the currency has indeed supported exports and foreign sales industries, resulting in accumulated foreign exchange reserves and impressive corporate profits. However, the side effects of this model have increasingly surfaced, with a large amount of capital failing to lead to widespread wage increases or consumption growth, instead driving up housing prices and asset prices, making life burdens heavier for young people and average families. This resonates with external criticisms of the “Taiwan disease”: economic growth concentrated in a few industries and enterprises, rather than being shared by the general public.

TSMC just reflects the “Taiwan disease”.

According to a recent report by The Economist, the so-called “Taiwan Disease/Formosa Flu” mainly refers to:

Taiwan has long maintained its export competitiveness by keeping the New Taiwan Dollar exchange rate low.

This indeed gives export-oriented enterprises (such as TSMC, electronics manufacturing services, traditional industries, etc.) a greater advantage in the international market. However, it also causes an economic “imbalance”: a large current account surplus, a dramatic increase in foreign exchange reserves, and an excess of funds flowing into the domestic market, which do not all convert into actual consumption or investment, but rather push up housing prices and asset prices, squeezing the consumption/burden capacity of ordinary families, especially young people and wage earners.

Some scholars have also pointed out that this model of export-oriented + currency devaluation + concentration of industries in a few powerful enterprises (like TSMC) may indeed lead to unbalanced development, resource misallocation, and social injustice.

In other words, TSMC's success relies not only on technology but also on favorable government policies, allowing it to become Taiwan's “sacred mountain” of the economy. However, this has led to an over-reliance of Taiwan's economy on the semiconductor and export industries, sacrificing the balance of “domestic demand, wage earners, small and medium enterprises, and diverse industrial development.” If economic growth and corporate profits are locked in exports and large technology and semiconductor supply chains, without translating into “general wage increases,” “industrial diversification,” and “stable/affordable housing prices,” the lives of most ordinary young people will not improve and may even become more difficult. This is precisely the “Taiwan disease” risk pointed out by The Economist, where economic benefits accrue only to a few companies and capital, while ordinary workers, those burdened by housing costs, and small and medium enterprises see no significant improvement. Ordinary people will only feel that the fruits of growth are enjoyed by a minority. Exports rely on currency depreciation for competition, daily consumption is still calculated in New Taiwan dollars, and wages rise slowly, not corresponding to real estate prices and inflation. Over time, the gap in social distribution and asset accumulation continues to widen.

From Peng Huainan's perspective, “putting it in today's context” is correct.

Between 2010 and 2015, Taiwanese society experienced a profound debate over the exchange rate of the New Taiwan Dollar. At that time, Morris Chang publicly criticized the government for being a stumbling block for businesses, pointing out that South Korea significantly enhanced its export competitiveness through currency depreciation, while Taiwan allowed the New Taiwan Dollar to appreciate, resulting in a 30% increase in costs for local enterprises over five years. His concerns reflected the reality that TSMC had not yet become a global leader and was facing fierce competition from Samsung. However, the central bank's governor, Perng Fai-nan, pointed out the key issue with his statement, 'If exchange rates could solve export problems, the whole world wouldn't need economists.' This highlighted that a country cannot maintain competitiveness by simply making its currency cheaper, nor should it sacrifice the purchasing power of the general public, price stability, and economic resilience for the sake of a few large exporters. The academic community was also divided into two camps at the time: one advocated for Taiwan to follow South Korea's depreciation to protect exports due to the high overlap in industries; the other opposed government intervention in exchange rates, believing that if Taiwan relied on depreciation for competitiveness, it would fall into a vicious cycle, distorting resource allocation and suppressing upgrading momentum in the long run. Looking back at today's Taiwan, Perng Fai-nan's warning has gradually proven true: exporters and the semiconductor industry have long benefited from a relatively low New Taiwan Dollar, but the fruits of this model have not genuinely reached the majority of young people and wage earners, instead making the overall economy more dependent on a few tech giants.

The cultural conflicts, collective discrimination lawsuits, and internal control loopholes exposed by TSMC in the United States further reflect the structural issues of rapid corporate growth and the lack of synchronized maturity in multinational governance. These events are not merely TSMC's problems, but rather issues stemming from Taiwan's long-term bet on exports, reliance on technology behemoths, and the economic structure formed by maintaining competitiveness through exchange rates, which is referred to as the “Taiwan disease” by The Economist. This debate over exchange rates from over a decade ago actually foreshadowed the imbalances Taiwan faces today: when a country's economy is overly dependent on a few industries, and when growth cannot translate into widespread improvements in living standards, the ones who are ultimately affected are not the globally mobile enterprises, but the people who remain on the island.

The Crisis of Collapse of Workplace Ethics and Management Systems in Taiwan

The recently retired veteran of TSMC, 20-year-old honorific academician Luo Weiren from Academia Sinica, has sparked public outcry for allegedly leaving with a large number of confidential documents and immediately joining Intel. Ironically, Intel has not only distanced itself from the incident but has openly supported Luo Weiren, showing an almost unabashed attitude. This incident is not just a loss for TSMC or Taiwan's semiconductor industry, but it also deeply shakes the foundational workplace ethics and trust system of Taiwan's overall industry.

For many, Luo Weiren has dedicated many years to the company and was even regarded as an important contributor to TSMC. However, he has now jumped to a competitor at the moment of retirement, and there are suspicions that he took key technical documents with him. This kind of “heartless and ungrateful” impact far surpasses individual career choices. It reflects the multiple issues accumulated in Taiwan's industry over the years: from the loosening of internal control systems, the gaps in succession and talent management, to the lack of a complete protective structure for the country's key technologies. Even more unsettling is the fact that the Taiwanese government has invested in policies, resources, land, and talent supply chains for many years, quietly safeguarding and supporting the industry behind the scenes, yet at the most critical moment, it has been met with betrayal, resulting not in loyalty and responsibility, but in the risks of defection and leaking secrets. This is not just a betrayal by a single enterprise or individual, but a warning signal from the overall system. When policies cannot protect the country's core technologies, and when ethics and trust cannot be maintained, no amount of subsidies and support for enterprises can save the situation of high housing prices, high costs of living, and the plight of low salaries and unemployment among young people.

This article discusses the continuous personnel storm of the national treasure TSMC, verifying the “Taiwan Disease” and the warning from Peng Huai-nan, first appearing in Chain News ABMedia.