In Geopolitics Today - Tuesday, May 18th
Taiwan and its Technology at the Center of Geopolitics, Who Really Owns Australia, and What Will Follow the Conservative Victory in the UK
Taiwan at the Crossroads of Geopolitics and Technological Advancement
The United States has come to regard China’s technological ascension as a challenge to its national security and as a mechanism for enabling China’s interests to be realised beyond its borders. Beijing, meanwhile, believes that Washington seeks to constrict its resurgence. Both takes are rather accurate.
At the core of those efforts are semiconductors. Taiwan is home to the most dominant firm in the field: the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). TSMC produces 84 percent of the world’s most advanced microchips. As Washington and Beijing recalibrate the terms of their economic interdependence and shift their supply chains to be less intertwined with each other, each is also looking to accelerate its domestic chip production.
In particular, the Biden administration is seeking to allocate $50 billion to semiconductor research and production, and TSMC is building a 12-inch wafer fabrication plant in Arizona. But in this sphere, the United States is playing catch-up. A September 2020 report found that its share of semiconductor manufacturing capacity had fallen from 37 percent in 1990 to 12 percent and estimated that that proportion would fall to 10 percent by 2030.
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Who Owns Australia?
The Guardian has published an insightful analysis of land ownership in Australia. The authors find that who owns the Australian outback is a vexed question. The true answer, according to their research, is the First Nations peoples, whose supposed ownership stems back 60,000 years. But the legal answer they find is more complex. It’s a mess of titles — freehold, pastoral leases, crown leases, public land, native titles and land held by certain Aboriginal trusts.
Pastoral leases cover 44% of Australia, according to Austrade. Pastoral leases are defined by Austrade as a title issued for the lease of an area of crown land to use for the limited purpose of grazing of stock and associated activities. The researchers were able to identify the leaseholders for just over half that area, pulling together data on more than 400 owners who together hold 700 stations covering 189.5m hectares — or about a quarter of the country.
The person who holds the most land in this pastoral-lease data, by far, is the Western Australian mining magnate Gina Rinehart, who controls 9.2m hectares, or 1.2% of Australia’s landmass, through three different corporate entities. The biggest corporate landholder is the ASX-listed Australian Agricultural Company. AAC’s biggest shareholder is the Bahamas-based AA Trust, controlled by the British billionaire Joe Lewis, who is also the owner of Tottenham Hotspur.
And about 40% of Australia is covered by native title, in both exclusive and shared lands. Australian government reports state that Indigenous communities hold the freehold title to 17% of the country, mainly in the Northern Territory and South Australia.
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What Next for the Conservatives of the United Kingdom?
Boris Johnson came to power because he grasped and exploited the way Brexit could take advantage of the desire of two large groups in English society — the affluent conservatives and the former proletarians of the vanquished industrial heartland. His ability to keep those two groups together has yielded a stunning sequence of successes: the Brexit referendum of June 2016, the contest to lead the Conservative Party in July 2019, in the general election of December 2019, and in forcing through an extreme version of Brexit that has taken the UK out of not only the European Union but also its single market and customs union.
On the surface, then, the victory for the Brexiteers seems total. It’s not just the fact that Britain left the EU, but also the idea that Johnson’s reshaping of the Conservatives as the Brexit party has apparently assured their hegemony in non-metropolitan England. The difficulty, however, is that having done its work, Brexit will not go away. Johnson does not want never-ending disarray, and as such he thought of leaving the EU as a once-and-for-all moment.
The trouble is that the Brexit revolution appears to have weakened a make-believe ruling class — not the actual elites who control Britain, but the scarecrow erected over decades by the Tory press and by Johnson himself as an active columnist. Brexit ended the rule of the Brussels bureaucrats who were supposedly depriving the stout English of their traditional liberties. And this rhetorical drive has been hugely effective, as demonstrated by the May 6 elections. But since this insurgency is based on ghostly apparitions in the form of exaggerations, it is rather hollow.
Because the EU was an imaginary enemy, all that has been extracted from cutting the UK’s ties to the EU is a sort of constructed revenge. And that force, when it becomes a political movement, is much less easy to control than Johnson’s triumphant progress might seem to indicate.
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