Xiaomi's Xring O3 is manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [1]
MediaTek Dimensity 9500 is also manufactured by TSMC N3P process in Taiwan. [2]
There was no world interdependence change (unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries).
[1] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Xiaomi-launches-XRing-O3-claim...
[2] https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9500-Proces...
> unless one considers China and Taiwan to be the same countries
The fact that the CCP is relaxed about core Chinese companies running their manufacturing in Taiwan might suggest that the CCP considers that it can make China and Taiwan one country, at a time of the CCP's choosing.
I've lived in Taiwan for a large part of my life.
They would lose all of TSMC if they do any military actions. It's not the fact that the CCP thinks that they can make Taiwan and China a country, it's the the fact that most of China does in fact consider them as one country. Taiwan is ready to defend themselves, but are very happy keeping their relationship with China the way it is.
"Very happy" is a bit of a stretch, since a significant proportion of Taiwan would prefer to jettison the current pretence of being "One China" and become fully independent.
But I agree that pretty much everybody will happily take the status quo over armed invasion.
I have a friend in Taiwan and he told me they're pretty happy because they have independence this way. If they go for more international recognition etc they'll gain nothing they don't already have but they'll upset the balance and give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
I've only visited Taiwan once and I only have one friend there so perhaps what I'm hearing is not accurate.
> give the CCP a reason to invade. So it will only make things worse.
CCP is not threatening taiwan because it might go for independence. it is _ALL_ about kicking the US out of the west Pacific. because of that, it is never about what people in Taiwan believe/say/do.
It is only about the military balance of the west Pacific.
> And a lot of people are sympathetic with the Chinese, just not their government.
sympathetic of what?
20 years ago, you might be able to play the "CCP regime repressing the people in China" joke, you can't do it anymore especially in such topic of Taiwan. quality of life is significantly better in literally every aspect in China. Taipei in 2026 is getting more and more like a tier-3 Chinese city in 2016.
It seems to be about much more than just regional power. To China it's a matter of pride and it's a big factor in the century of humiliation.
Even when a country other than the US does something to benefit Taiwan, Beijing is super offended.
And by sympathetic I mean feeling kinship. And the whole concept of bringing everything down to a matter of wealth is so American.
Considering all said so far, and events, it perhaps hardly makes real difference in the diamond era's franchised world.
Isn't there some kind of "if you invade us we bomb our strategic factories" strategy? Like "if we can't have them, nobody can"?
I think the plan is to defend, with allies motivated by the goal of saving TSMC facilities. If you destroy them the moment China declares war, Taiwanese allies might be much less invested
But at the same time everyone understands that the Taiwanese would destroy the facilities before they fall into Chinese hands
If both those are true, then shouldn't we expect China to destroy them as part of first offensive?
Why would China care if Taiwan blows up its fabs?
The talent is still there, so they could rebuild, or recruit the talent to work for Chinese mainland fabs instead?
wouldn't it be more likely that they'd flee to e.g. the US which would poach them and shower them with money?
maybe easier said than done but still
Can't flee if your island is encircled and shooting down airplanes. China's military drills are executing exactly this.
The US could do this TODAY. Just saying.
Let's say they execute that plan. What then? Would it win them anything?
As a resident of Taiwan, would you say the average person there is comfortable obeying a strong central government, whoever that currently is?
As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
As an American, what are ways in which you can not defer to an authority - in a way that actually matters? Sure, you can choose to go outside dressed in gaudy colors, or not dressed at all if you are in SF. Or choose to flip the Democrat/Republican bit once every 4 years (usually without any effect on domestic or foreign policy, though not lately). But in a regular person's life, what authority do you want to opt out of? The average person can't do a thing about their HOA board, let alone a government representative.
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> As an American, I found the deference to authority very strange.
Are schoolchildren in the US still required to recite the pledge of allegiance...?
Really? Surely it can't be unfamiliar at least. So many GOPs anxiously mentioning Dear Leader every chance they get.
My bet would be that invasion wouldn't look like quick war, but slow control of political power either through light force like economic blackmail, or through something similar to what US did with Venezuela.
Now that US has already opened the gate to labelling nation head as drug seller, this just eases things for China.
Also the US has very publicly shown they don’t have the ability to effectively wage war over any period of time.
Yes and no. The Iran war is deeply unpopular and won’t even pass congressional approval for money. It’s being fought from pocket change budgets because they know they can’t pass a funding bill for it. Also not the same kind of war.
Any period time? US waged war for 20+ years in Afghanistan. Pretty effectively! To what end? Not an end an army can really achieve so… there you are.
But a war that might actually be popular? To save the world from communist dictators and make sure we have chips for our precious devices? I wouldn’t count out the United States. Or nuclear weapons, which still exist and are a thing.
And it'd be the kind of war the US is best at. Boots on the ground, against conventional military, with a civilian population that is on the side of the US forces
No guerilla warfare, no insurgents, no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles
> no need for extended beyond-visual-range warfare that depletes missile stockpiles
Was with you until that last one. If you haven't noticed missiles, drones, and interceptors have played a central role in ukraine.
How many boots on the ground could you get and how quickly/safely? The supposed opposition here is MUCH closer to the island.
just a gut feeling, but if they had to for some reason, I feel like they'd just go in and bomb as much strategic assets and invade, because in their eyes aside from Taiwan, there isn't much left to "unify" and it'd be historic, not something they'd need to do every decade or even century
I feel like Russia thought the same of Ukraine, even though it is way bigger
Any country that competently adopts Ukrainian drone technology cannot effectively be invaded currently. And that's for a continental invasion.
Taiwan? All surface ships are sitting ducks. Troop transport ships would get absolutely decimated, and then the landing troops would get swarmed by drones all over again, and then they have to maintain logistics to the small minority that land (good luck with that). And that's without naval drones.
With naval drones? I have no idea how China gets anything across the strait.
And all the above is true for a competently organized Chinese invasion. Which it won't be.
They already consider it as one country. The CCP sees Taiwan as a province of China.
Or mainland China is occupied west Taiwan.
That act could throw us all back into the dark ages, though.
They're intentional about economic integration because it will in theory make unification easier without a war.
Its the opposite
China isn’t going to invade China until after we get our semiconductors up and running in Arizona for real
(because US won’t have to think about that situation ever again)
removing dependence imperils that island, CCP already has an EUV machine so the inevitable sanctions and export controls on ASML’s in Europe won’t matter either
It technically does not matter today. Sure the SOTA fabs only exist in a few places, but it’s not like a 2010/2015/2020 era chip is unusable trash. All of which are more geographically distributed.
For any critical workload a chip is considered trash after 5-7 years. They still run , of course, but increased incidents on platforms that are supposed to be 99.99 are hard to work with. Now if you mean there’s unused stock of those , that would maybe work, but I am not aware of significant unused stocks.
I am talking about making new chips on older nodes. If China can only build 7nm, but TSMC is at 3nm, that’s unfortunate, but they will survive.
MediaTek is a Taiwanese company. Xiaomi could put any backdoor that the government tell them to install and TSMC won't be able to catch that.
I'm unaware of any actual hardware backdoors introduced by primary manufacturers in practice, especially those installed in Xiaomi hardware.
There are accounts of interdiction and post-manufacturing compromises, such as those revealed in the Snowden leaks (2013) and most recently by reporting about the Israeli security services' sabotage of Hezbollah pagers and 2-way radios. These projects didn't expose primary manufacturers to the reputational and legal risk of association.
Until there's evidence of backdoors implanted by these companies, it's better to adopt a "trust but verify" approach and use standard layered security practices to detect intrusion. Conventional network intrusion and insider threat campaigns carry less risk of failure and are simpler and cheaper to execute.
I'm only aware of some software backdoors in Chinese devices, but times when you could've reverse engineered a chip with microscope are long gone. If there are any it would be really difficult to find them.
Intel management engine
“It’s not a vulnerability, it’s a feature!”
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Get off the short bus twin. CPU backdoors do no good unless there is cooperation with network driver code or the CPU itself has full operating system with a full network stack.
Intel's ME comes really close to that, but I don't think Intel's ME has drivers for every possible NIC and bus a NIC can appear on in its little Minix. So, just put a Broadcom NIC in a PCIe slot and leave the Intel onboard NIC empty, or LAN facing only.
Xiaomi may get Chinese 4G/5G baseband chip manufacturers to put in backdoors in Chinese phones, but they're not needed - the Chinese government pretty much already has total control of its Internet. For other countries, how are they going to make Qualcomm provide something undocumented CPU instructions can access.
You can refute their statement without personal attacks.
Not knowing a thing makes someone uninformed, not retarded.
My retardation status is unrelated to my statement. You assert there are top secret register values but without any evidence beyond your most recent psilocybin trip.
The existence of undocumented hardware behavior isn't proof of anything.
Everyone relax. This guy on the Internet is unaware of any.
And are you aware of any? If nobody can find evidence then it's probably not a widespread risk.
Do you say the same about Intel, Amd, etc. or is it only big bad China?
There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things - starting with clipper. Pushback is not always successful - but it's far more transparent then China.
Are there any documented cases of backdoors being present in Chinese hardware at time of manufacturing?
Probably, but you are asking the wrong question: Is it legal to produce non-backdoored networked devices or services in China?
The answer to that question in the US is within epsilon of “no” thanks to the cloud act.
Europe and China have passed similar laws. However, China has a reputation for passing laws then selectively enforcing them. Maybe if you get on the right side of the right party member, the answer might still be “Yes” there.
Anyway, the next question to ask is: Who would I rather backdoor my device?
I doubt the Chinese government cares much about me, and unless I vacation there it’s an international incident if they, say, hack my car and murder me by aiming it at a tree at 95mph, like the CIA apparently does now:
https://www.motor1.com/news/138679/wikileaks-claim-cia-hack-...
Of course, the US government banned cars from China. Presumably this is because they do not have the mandated remote murder network port open, or, if they do, the US doesn’t have the necessary permissions to access it.
Two just this year, CVE-2026-66747 and CVE-2026-11405.
Those are both great examples. I think this doesn't obliterate my point, though it weakens it. The manufacturer in CVE-2026-11405 is already out of business, and the one in CVE-2026-66747 is unlikely to continue as a going concern.
Would Xiaomi or the CCP accept the reputational and legal risk of getting caught with a backdoor? Recall the CCP considered the arrest of the Huawei executive in Canada as an offense against itself.
>There's been 40 years of documented push back when western governments try to backdoor things
A bit of selective memory necessary for that take given good old Crypto AG
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
Too many propoganda leads to expressions like yours. Sorry your story has zero foundation and is fox news quality.
Like a stopped clock, Fox News is right once or twice a day.
For instance election tampering in the US is a well-documented thing: However it almost always favors republicans in districts with electronic voting machines that do not generate paper trails.
As for the person you are replying to, their claims have been documented by most media outlets, places like wikileaks, and their claims are backed by US legal requirements to backdoor stuff (like the US Cloud act).
My opinion about Trump is as bad as the next guy's, but we still have better relation with the USA than with China. And it's not like we have much choice.
There are already American backdoors on intel and AMD chips everywhere, we call them ME and PSP. Switching to chinese tech won't make it worse.
Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
> Now, if the EU would start make to make chips that have no subsystem to screw me over, that would be something.
Why would they not do the same? They are very pro-surveillance for a start.
Hopefully the same pushback that has so far stopped the worst of chat control would help. But even if not having more western alternatives would be very welcome. If you're in the US it may not resonate with you, but as a Canadian currently reading ongoing rhetoric about being annexed by the US I'd love to have options if things continue to go south with the status quo.
It's good to be skeptical about how we implement the idea of a "root of trust" in these machines, but matter-of-factly characterizing ME and PSP as "backdoor" is misleading and not useful.
TSMC doesn't care what you put in your CPUs. Apple could tell them they want to build a CPU where 90% of the transistor footprint is for a new CIA Engine that takes pictures of your feet every three seconds to trace where you've been from the smell and TSMC's response would be "how many wafers do you want?".