The Legislative Yuan’s Internal Administration Committee is to review a draft additional clause to Article 5 of the National Security Act (國家安全法), which says that any state employee, namely military personnel, public-school teachers or public servants, whether currently employed or retired, who has been convicted of espionage would not only forfeit their monthly pension, but would also have to return any pension payments leading up to the time that the crime was committed.
The draft amendment is certainly a step in the right direction, for it would not only have a preventive effect on treasonous activities, but would also facilitate US military sales to Taiwan.
People keep selling out the nation because the punishments meted out for espionage activities in Taiwan are not severe enough, and the laws are far too lenient.
A case in point is the conviction of two people for their involvement in developing the most extensive spy ring that Taiwan has known. Former Chinese People’s Liberation Army intelligence officer Zhen Xiaojiang (鎮小江) was in 2015 sentenced to a mere four years in jail by the Supreme Court for masterminding the ring, while retired Taiwanese major-general Hsu Nai-chuan (許乃權) was sentenced to only two years and 10 months.
Upon his release at the end of his sentence last year, Hsu was still eligible for a pension worth 70 percent of his salary, more than NT$70,000 a month.
Over the past few years, to consolidate the air force’s military capability, the Ministry of National Defense, in addition to upgrading Indigenous Defense Fighters and F-16 warplanes, has been looking into ways to continue purchasing more advanced fighters, such as the Lockheed Martin F-35B, from the US.
The ministry hopes to use the fighter — with its short take-off and landing, stealth, and vertical take-off and landing capabilities — as a point of reference for developing Taiwan’s next generation of fighters.
However, due to the frequency of espionage cases in Taiwan, the US has made it well-known, on more than one occasion, that it is concerned the Taiwanese government cannot protect confidential information about military equipment that the US might sell to Taiwan. These concerns make it all the more difficult for the nation to secure the purchase of high-tech military weapons from the US.
Peter Mattis, a US expert on China’s intelligence services, wrote of the “dark decade” of the past 10 years of Chinese espionage activities in Taiwan in a 2016 article, recommending that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the government conduct risk-management assessments and make improvements to security planning.
Otherwise, it would be difficult for Taiwan to have close cooperative ties with its closest security partners, he wrote.
The legislature’s willingness to amend the law to address the failings and loopholes in the anti-espionage laws is something that the public as a whole should support.
Yao Chung-yuan is a former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s Strategic Planning Division.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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