The Chinese government is using Taiwanese fishermen to spy on the ROC military, a legislative group warned yesterday.
The government should be on alert against Chinese authorities systematically making use of Taiwanese fishing crews to collect confidential information for the enemy, members of the Alliance Against Selling out Taiwan said.
Security authorities unexpectedly discovered frequent collaboration between fishermen and Chinese authorities when they checked on the activity of national fishing and commercial ships in response to the government's concern of the dangers of direct transportation links, revealed DPP Legislator Trong Chai (蔡同榮), a member of the alliance.
The Taiwanese fishermen and businessmen received bribes from the Chinese government to photograph Taiwan's coasts, providing Beijing with images which are confidential thus raising a great national security issue, Chai added.
The ships also engaged in illicit conduct such as transporting Chinese stowaways or other smuggling illegalities, according to the lawmaker.
Another alliance member, independent Legislator Peter Lin (林進興), cautioned that the recruited fishing vessels had spied on the country's Hankuang No. 19 military drills in Ilan in May. The fishermen were responsible for updating Beijing as the exercise progressed, he said. He said that he corroborated his information with military officials.
DPP Legislator Charles Chiang (江昭儀), another member of the legislative group, said that Beijing has registered all Taiwanese fishing ships of having accepted spying missions and allows them to travel freely to any fishing, commercial or military harbors in China.
Fellow Legislator Lee Cheng-nan (李鎮楠) added that Taiwan's intelligence personnel had speculated that the ships also acted as a channel to help Taiwanese gangsters travel in and out of Taiwan without proper documentation.
The Coast Guard Administration needs to reinforce its job of security checks on fishing vessels and commercial ships, the group members said.
The US spy ship USNS Bowditch was also spotted in early May off the military port of Suao at a distance close enough to be identified with binoculars, defense sources divluged on May 25.
The Bowditch sails only in international waters but China has intercepted the ship and force it away from its shores and has used fishing boats to deliberately bump into the US vessel as a way of scaring it off.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read: