A former South Korean representative to Taiwan argues Korea's chip industry is falling behind because it copied the technology but not the system that built TSMC — a warning for Korea, and a compliment to Taiwan.

• The book credits Taiwan's rise to constant reform under pressure, not to any single technical edge.
• Taiwan cleaned up its banks in the 2000s and cut inheritance taxes sharply, which kept family firms and their money from moving to Hong Kong or Singapore.
• TSMC's edge is openness: it promised never to compete with its own customers, so chip designers, equipment makers and packaging firms grew alongside it instead of being swallowed by it.
• Korea's giants prefer to own the whole chain top to bottom; Taiwan built a wide network of partner companies around its champions.
• Taiwanese firms started pulling their best technology home from China in the 2010s, and moving supply chains now costs far more than it did then.

Outlook: The two countries look more like partners than rivals from here, since Korea's memory chips and Taiwan's manufacturing and packaging have to be designed together for AI hardware.