The US now learns what Taiwan knew before

Taiwan does not need a CIA deputy director to explain that Beijing treats commerce as a battlefield. It has been living that lesson for decades, watching its chip designers get poached, its retired officers get recruited for cash, and its companies get pressured to choose between the Chinese market and their own government’s security priorities. What changed this month is that Washington finally said the quiet part out loud.

CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis told a Washington audience that China’s threat to the US is now “fundamentally different,” because the competition is economic, not military, and that a Chinese company cannot be treated as genuinely private when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can absorb or direct it at will.

This is not a new insight in Taipei. It is the working assumption behind every export control on advanced lithography equipment, every debate in the Legislative Yuan about Chinese investment in the semiconductor supply chain, and every prosecution of a retired general caught building a spy network for a bowl of noodles and a modest stipend. Taiwan has spent 30 years treating Chinese capital as a potential delivery mechanism for state power. Washington is only now updating its assumptions to match the country Taiwan has always had to live next to.

The same week Ellis spoke, federal agents in Detroit charged a Chinese national, Zeng Weiheng, with lying about why he had spent 20 minutes photographing cargo planes at O’Hare International Airport. Zeng was not a trained intelligence officer. He was a college student in Canada, allegedly paid by a contact he believed was tied to the CCP to photograph specific aircraft and tail numbers, a task cheap enough and deniable enough that losing him cost Beijing nothing.

Taiwan’s own counterintelligence record is full of Zengs: low-ranking, financially motivated, recruited through family ties or business contacts and disposable by design. The scale is different, the method is not. What the O’Hare case demonstrates on US soil, Taiwanese security services have been documenting for a generation, usually with far less international attention.

The useful thing about Washington’s shift is not that it discovered anything new. It is that it removed a piece of cover that Beijing-friendly voices in Taiwan have relied on for years: the argument that treating cross-strait economic integration as a security risk is paranoid, protectionist or an overreaction driven by Taipei’s politics.

If the CIA argues publicly that a Chinese semiconductor firm cannot be assumed independent of the CCP, then the same logic applies with more force, not less, to a Chinese-linked investment vehicle courting a Taiwanese supplier or to political factions here who insist that deeper economic ties with China are merely business. That argument was always thin; it just got a lot thinner.

None of this should be read as vindication for its own sake. The point of Washington catching up is not that Taipei gets to say it told you so, although it would be entitled to. The point is that shared threat assessment is the precondition for shared policy, on export controls, on investment screening, on the defense package still stalled in the legislature by parties more interested in denying the threat than countering it.

Taiwan has spent years explaining what it is like to share a border with an authoritarian state that does not recognize the line between its companies and its intelligence services. It is a strange kind of relief to watch Washington arrive, slightly out of breath, at the same conclusion.

Clive Hazell is a Kaohsiung-based writer and educator. A 30-year-resident of Taiwan and Japan, he writes on geopolitics, culture and East Asia.