The media was born to act as a check and balance on the government. This means frequent hostility between a government and the media. The Taiwan High Court last week sentenced former Power News (
It was true that Hung obtained classified documents from his friends in the military and wrote about it. His punishment, based on the Statute for Punishment of Betrayal of Military Secrets (
China is an authoritarian state and the scope of its military secrets could include almost anything -- from the health condition of state leaders to news about natural disasters to SARS cases. Like all other dictatorships in history, the breadth and depth of authoritarianism is proportionate to the scope of state secrets. The more dictatorial a government, the more state secrets it has. Of course, these secrets are defined by dictators or the ruling clique, not by the will of the public. Control over the power to define state secrets and the formulation of laws to punish people who leak such secrets is a characteristic of authoritarianism.
In a democratic country, there are fewer state secrets. The definition of "state secrets" in democratic countries is not legitimate unless approved by their legislatures. State secrets cannot be defined by the whims of government agencies, especially not military or intelligence agencies. How can we talk about human rights if such arbitrary definitions incriminate people at every turn?
Press freedoms cannot be without limit or else there would be anarchy. However, Taiwan's most potent weapon in its fight against Beijing is not the armed forces or weapons, but abstract concepts such as freedom and democracy. Freedom of speech is what China fears.
The Control Yuan has said in an investigation report that many military defectors have leaked secrets to Beijing and that China's satellite technology has exposed the nation's military facilities like so many naked bodies. This nation relies on the US for security and what links Taiwan to the US is the shared values of freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law.
The malicious leaking of state secrets, which harms national security, should certainly be punished. But the premise for such punishment is that the definition of state secrets must be regulated by law. It should not be unilaterally determined by the military.
A new State Secrets Law (
When there is a conflict between disclosure and national security, we can resort to judicial judgment. Only then can we legally protect military secrets while also protecting press freedoms and freedom of speech.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs