China’s execution on Friday of medical researcher Wo Weihan (伍維漢), 59, on charges of passing on “secrets” to a group affiliated with Taiwanese intelligence was a disgraceful act that warrants far more than the condemnation Beijing received from the US, the EU and a handful of rights organizations.
As Amnesty International and other critics pointed out, Wo’s confession that he discussed the health of a senior Chinese official and copied military data from unclassified magazines was made under duress. Even under Chinese law, however, Wo’s alleged offenses were so trivial and so unremarkable that the death penalty could not have been justified.
Apart from failing to modernize its antique definition of “state secrets,” Beijing also missed an opportunity to show Taiwan some of the “goodwill” President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been desperately seeking by sparing the life of an alleged Taiwanese intelligence asset. Nothing would have demonstrated that cross-strait relations had turned the page more dramatically than for Beijing to void a death sentence against a man who, if indeed guilty, stood as a symbol of the warring relationship of old, when spies, rather than envoys, defined the state of affairs between the rivals (Wo was arrested in Beijing in January 2005).
By failing to do so, China showed that cross-strait “peace” initiatives will not temper its pursuit of unforgiving objectives, destroying lives and families in the process.
The move did nothing to embellish Beijing’s reputation abroad, where hundreds of Chinese agents, students and businesspeople steal secrets — real secrets, as opposed to health information or articles from unclassified magazines — from Western countries. To give one example, the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, created by the US Congress in 2000 to monitor US-China issues, wrote in its annual report last month that “China is stealing vast amounts of sensitive information from US computer networks,” echoing conclusions from the previous year that Beijing was pursuing new technology “aggressively” through research and business deals and industrial espionage.
Other states have long considered Beijing to be the world’s foremost economic and military spy, whether targeting individuals, groups or governments.
If the West were to sentence to death every Chinese operative caught red-handed in an act of espionage and every employee of Xinhua news agency — long identified by Western counter-intelligence as an arm of Chinese intelligence — death row would run the length of the Great Wall.
To its discredit, Taipei remained silent in the days leading to Wo’s execution. After all, if Wo did work with Taiwanese intelligence, the least Taipei could have done for one of its assets was try to come to the man’s rescue.
If Wo was innocent, as he claimed to the day he died, the Cabinet could have easily established this by liaising with intelligence agencies and placing pressure on the Chinese to do the right thing.
Perhaps, as many states do when sensitive matters unfold, Taipei worked behind the scenes and contacted Beijing in an attempt to have the sentence overturned.
Absent official comment, there is no way of knowing. Still, Taipei could have easily taken the moral high ground on the matter by publicly calling for Wo’s life to be spared.
But it didn’t, and this silence was an act of cowardice that reflects very poorly on the Ma administration. Wo’s daughters, not to mention members of Taiwan’s intelligence community who place their lives at risk, would be justified in demanding hard answers.
An outrageous dismissal of the exemplary Taiwanese fight against COVID-19 has been perpetrated by the EU. There is no excuse. I presume that everyone who reads the Taipei Times knows that the EU has excluded Taiwan from its so-called “safe list,” which permits citizens unhindered travel to and from the countries of the EU. As the EU does not feel that it needs to explain the character of this exclusive list, perhaps we should examine it ourselves in some detail. There are 14 nations on the list that have been chosen as safe countries of origin and safe countries of destination for
Filmmakers in Taiwan used to struggle when it came to telling a story that could resonate internationally. Things started to change when the 2017 drama series The Teenage Psychic (通靈少女), a collaboration between HBO Asia and Taiwanese Public Television Service (PTS), became a huge hit not just locally, but also internationally. The coming-of-age story was adapted from the 2013 PTS-produced short film The Busy Young Psychic (神算). Entirely filmed in Taiwan, the Mandarin-language series even made it on HBO’s streaming platforms in the US. It is proof that a well-told Taiwanese story can absolutely win the hearts and minds of hard-to-please
Drugged with sedatives, handcuffed and wearing a bright orange prison tunic, British fraud investigator and former journalist Peter Humphrey was escorted by warders into an interrogation room filled with reporters, locked inside a steel cage and fastened to a metal “tiger chair.” Humphrey recalls: “I was completely surrounded by officers, dazed, manacled and with cameras pointing at me through the bars. I was fighting for my life like a caged animal. It was horrifying.” Footage from the interrogation was later artfully edited to give the appearance of a confession and broadcast on Chinese state media. While this might sound like an
The US House of Representatives on July 1 passed by unanimous consent a bipartisan bill that would penalize Chinese officials who implement Beijing’s new national security legislation in Hong Kong, as well as banks that do business with them. The following day, the US Senate unanimously passed the bill, which was later sent to the White House, where it awaits US President Donald Trump’s signature. The bill does not spell out what the sanctions would look like and Trump has yet to sign it into law, but Reuters on Thursday last week reported that five major Chinese state lenders are considering
RSS