A Chinese court has sentenced a Taiwanese national and a Chinese television advertising executive to prison sentences of up to 11 years for spying, a court official said yesterday.
The People's Intermediate Court in Anqing, Anhui Province, on April 23 sentenced Taiwanese national Chang Hsin-min (
Li Qingsheng (
China News Service reported the case late on Wednesday. China's official Xinhua news agency reported the convictions yesterday.
The court ordered the seizure of assets worth 50,000 yuan (US$6,000) each, reports said.
Li, 47, was convicted of collecting political and military intelligence for Taiwan over the course of 10 years, news reports said. He is alleged to have visited Taiwan three times between 1994 and 1997, and to have joined the Taiwanese military's Intelligence Bureau, earning a monthly salary of US$400.
He is alleged to have received espionage training and equipment and to have been paid US$20,000 for providing classified documents to Chang, 34, who traveled to China frequently.
China has rounded up at least 26 people for spying for Taiwan since December.
A group of Taiwanese businessmen was paraded in front of reporters in January in an unprecedented display apparently aimed at embarrassing Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in the run-up to the nation's presidential election.
Tension has been simmering since the elections, which Chen won by a small margin. Chen is reviled by Beijing for his stance on Taiwanese identity and sovereignty.
Despite the military and political rivalry between China and Taiwan, bilateral trade, investment and civilian exchanges have boomed since the late 1980s.
In the biggest espionage scandal of China's Communist era, a Chinese general and a colonel were executed in 1999 for spying for Taiwan.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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