In August 2021, Lee Jae-yong was released on parole from prison in South Korea where he had been held on a bribery conviction. The Korean government cited overcrowded prison conditions when announcing his release, but Lee was no ordinary prisoner. He was the vice-chairman of Samsung Electronics and the son of Samsung's founder, Lee Kun-hee. Despite an official five-year ban on employment, as soon as he was released, Lee went directly to the Samsung's headquarters for a briefing, and deploying an interesting ambiguity, Samsung considered him to have resumed work despite not being employed.

At the time, the world was experiencing a shortage of semiconductor chips. Perhaps not coincidentally, Samsung was one of the three largest chipmakers, the other two being the US-based Intel and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Indeed, the South Korean president justified Mr. Lee's release as a matter of national interest. Half of the world's chipmaking or “foundry” capacity resided with TSMC, and Taiwan was experiencing what could politely be called “political risk” given China's stated goal of reintegrating it back into the Communist fold. Indeed, almost exactly a year later, Chinese forces surrounded Taiwan in a four-day military exercise that interrupted trade.

Samsung's potential to offset this kind of risk was a topic of discussion in the business world, and firms relying on TSMC chips were looking for ways to diversify their chip sourcing. More generally, Samsung and Mr. Lee were caught in the crosswinds of evolving techno-nationalism. China is one of the world's biggest demanders of chips, and Samsung operates in China to help to satisfy this demand. At the same time, the US government is keen to ramp up semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the United States, and Samsung has agreed to be part of that effort as well. We need to consider rival techno-nationalist regimes, as well as the very concept of techno-nationalism, to understand these dynamics.

The Emergence of Techno-Nationalism

As we saw in Chapter 3 on industry and war, techno-nationalism as a feature of economic nationalism is nothing new. It was part of List's “productive power” project that was embraced by Japan in the late nineteenth century. As for the contemporary use of the term, legal scholar Robert Reich played an important role in a 1987 article.