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As the ongoing de-coupling between China and the collective West accelerates, Chinese companies are adopting increasingly aggressive strategies to gain any possible advantage, going so far as to use front companies to poach Taiwan’s highly prized talent.
To wit, as per a report by Nikkei Asia, Taiwan is currently investigating at least 16 Chinese companies for poaching Taiwan’s prized talent through covert means.
Intetestingly, the list of China-linked companies under investigation in Taiwan includes Victory Giant Tech (Huizhou Co. Ltd.), a supplier of PCBs to NVIDIA. Other notable investigation vectors include the supplier of acoustic components to Google and Meta, Goertek, and China’s leading display chip design company, Chipone.
The investigation Bureau of Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice has provided additional details on this ongoing investigation via a dedicated press release, noting with alarm the tactics that many of these China-linked companies employ, which include country of origin obfuscation by “setting up operations in Taiwan as fake Taiwanese or overseas Chinese capital” and routing poached talent to China via fictitious human resource management companies.
The Bureau mobilized 300 personnel for this investigation, leading to the search of 70 distinct premises within Taiwan and the questioning of 120 individuals.
Of course, the history of Chinese corporate espionage and sabotage in Taiwan is quite entrenched. As per a report released by Taiwan’s National Security Bureau in early 2025, the country has witnessed a 300 percent increase in instances of corporate espionage by China-linked entities, with such cases rising from 16 in 2021 to 64 in 2024.
More recently, China-backed hackers targeted Taiwan’s semiconductor industry via elaborate espionage campaigns, with three such groups of hackers identified between March and June 2025 alone. According to the cyber security firm Proofpoint, these campaigns represented an unprecedented level of coordination and sophistication, with target vectors going beyond semiconductor companies to encompass “individuals at major international investment firms specializing in Taiwanese semiconductor investment analysis.”
