She initially aroused suspicion after claiming to be “about five or six months pregnant but had a big belly that looked like she was in the third trimester.”The combination of high domestic demand and an extremely constricted supply of semiconductors has created a bustling underground market for microchips in China, where secondhand or out-of-date chips can fetch 500 times their original cost.According to one unauthorized broker who spoke to Bloomberg, the “conventional system whereby auto suppliers place an order through an authorized agent and wait for distribution from an original chipmaker no longer works.”With China’s semiconductor crisis only looking to worsen in the coming year, the U.S. chip ban is being described as a “massive escalation” in the trade and geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, according to Bill Bishop, a seasoned China analyst and author of the Sinocism newsletter.China, which has called the American decision to tighten export controls a violation of international trade rules that will “isolate and backfire” on the U.S., may now be looking at taking charge of Taiwan's booming semiconductor industry.“You can argue that by depriving the Chinese of access to semiconductors, we up the risk that they seize Taiwan,” Hedge fund Citadel CEO Ken Griffin said in a recent interview.This story was originally featured on Fortune.comMore from Fortune: The American middle class is at the end of an era Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire ‘was run by a gang of kids in the Bahamas’ who all dated each other The 5 most common mistakes lottery winners make Sick with a new Omicron variant?"