Nanjing Army Command College, China
JUNIOR SERGEANT JIAN ZHANG’S commanders were wasting no time. Less than twelve hours had elapsed since the address to his unit by the Party official from Beijing and already each man had been assigned specific tasks for the planned capture of Taiwan’s TSMC microchip facility in Hsinchu. Multi-skilled by training, it was a lottery as to who got what. Some were assigned to the Electronic Warfare and Communications Unit, their job to cut off Taiwan’s premier semiconductor facility from the outside world. Others were part of a diversion force, their aim to distract Taiwan’s ground forces to make it harder for them to regain the initiative once Zhang and his team arrived on the scene. A separate paramilitary police unit was assigned to enforce control of the population, supported by scores of trained investigators from the Ministry of State Security who would soon be scouring the records of every employee, searching for those least sympathetic to Beijing.
Zhang was fiercely proud of the role he had been given. He had been specially selected to be part of the high-value target team. Their job, it was explained to them, would be to locate and hunt down every senior scientist and technician at TSMC, whether they were on shift at the time or at their homes in Hsinchu. From now on, he and the rest of the team would be required to familiarize themselves with every name, face and address on the lists provided by the Ministry.
The People’s Liberation Army would not just be capturing the physical entity of the company. When the day came, it would be seizing the beating intellectual heart of Taiwan’s entire economy.