Wearing rain ponchos and holding photos of their ancestral temples near Hsinchu, Taiwan's semiconductor capital, 40 residents braved lashing winds in early October to protest plans to take their rural land for cutting-edge chip production.
Two weeks later, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd (TSMC), the world's largest contract chipmaker, dropped plans to build a factory as part of the science park expansion in the bucolic Longtan district nearby — a development that heartened protesters and laid bare one of Taiwan's increasingly fraught "five shortages."
If the land crunch on the densely populated and mountainous island pushes TSMC to shift more production outside Taiwan — countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany have offered it billions in incentives to do so — it could weaken the backbone of Taiwan's economy, analysts say.