Hsinchu Industrial Park, Taiwan
‘TRANSFORM YOUR PASSION into results.’ That was the sign he passed every single morning, and again in the evenings, on his way home, often after working unsociably late hours. But the truth was that Chen Chin-lung, outwardly loyal and long-standing employee of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, wasn’t feeling a lot of passion about his job, these days. True, he had won some minor accolade at the 33rd Taiwan Continuous Improvement Awards, but that had been a few years ago and for some time now he had felt his professional career was stagnating, stalling, going nowhere. Every morning he would arrive punctually at 7.50 a.m., park his white Toyota Sienta in his designated spot and walk the last few metres past all the neatly trimmed hedges and lawns beneath the featureless white building in which he worked that bore those giant four letters: TSMC.
The company that produced 65 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and over 90 per cent of the high-end ones was famously tight on security. It needed to be. It wasn’t just Taiwan’s giant Communist neighbour across the Strait that wanted to get their hands on TSMC’s microchip secrets. With its literally cutting-edge tech, this company was the envy of the world when it came to manufacturing high-precision chips. Hence, many of its sixty-five thousand employees in the more sensitive positions were being carefully screened and searched, although that had not prevented a major ransomware hack by a Russian gang in the summer of 2023. In recent months, though, TSMC had found itself under such pressure to hire more staff that it had had to relax the rules.
It was in this new-found corporate environment that Chen Chin-lung was able to do what he did without being detected. On the third Tuesday of every month, regular as clockwork, he would leave a little earlier than usual, telling everyone it was an ongoing family commitment. And, in a way, that was exactly what it was. It was a commitment to enrich his family’s fortunes by nefarious means. His friendship with the young woman in the café had blossomed into a close but platonic relationship, more transactional than romantic. She had a name: Lihua, or Pear Blossom. A symbol of good fortune. And each month some of that good fortune was paid into a secret bank account in his name in Singapore, to be accessed only when he was out of the country to avoid the prying eyes of the National Security Bureau.
Chen Chin-lung was under no illusion that what he was doing was wrong. He knew he was taking a risk each time he smuggled a document Lihua asked him for out of the building. He never enquired as to where they ended up and she never told him, but the money was accumulating nicely in that Singapore account and for a while he found it a satisfactory arrangement. It was four months into this when he started to get cold feet. The inspectors and investigators from the National Security Bureau had begun making unannounced spot checks on staff and their digital histories, going into their desktops and laptops, peering into every entry. Every page of every document, every formula and every algorithm had to be accounted for. Chen Chin-lung felt the walls closing in on him and he needed to terminate the arrangement.
When he suggested, at their next Tuesday-afternoon meeting, that it was time to call a halt, Lihua was very calm but there was a new hardness in her voice. Her face perfectly composed, she opened the leather satchel she carried and retrieved a large, A4-sized photograph. He recognized it immediately. It was of him with one of his Chinese hosts at that corporate event he had attended in Malaysia.
‘That man next to you,’ she told him, ‘is the Director of Cyber Espionage at the Ministry of State Security in Beijing. I think your bosses at TSMC would be very interested in seeing this picture, don’t you? And so would the National Security Bureau.’ She handed him the photograph. ‘You can keep this.’ She patted his hand. ‘We have plenty of copies. But you have no need to worry. No one is going to see it.’ She smiled at him sweetly. ‘Just so long as our arrangement continues.’