China is increasing its espionage efforts against rival Taiwan, using Taiwanese businesspeople resident in China to try to extract secrets, a senior intelligence official said yesterday.
Joey Wang, chief of the Foreign Affairs Office of the Ministry of Justice's Investigation Bureau -- Taiwan's equivalent of the FBI -- said the presence of more than 100,000 Taiwanese on the mainland had created special challenges for his agency.
"There is no question that expanding business ties over the past 10 years have made our jobs much more difficult," Wang said. "There are many more cases of espionage now than there were in the early 1990s."
Wang said a special feature of Chinese intelligence efforts against Taiwan was to use Taiwanese businesspeople to enlist friends and acquaintances in the island's security establishment to obtain classified information and military technology.
"Last year, we discovered a case of Chinese intelligence agents enlisting a Taiwan resident on the mainland to get an official of the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense Communications Development Agency to deliver sensitive military information," he said.
Wang said another focus of China's efforts against Taiwan was to use the island as a springboard to spy on the US.
He said two years ago, Investigation Bureau agents uncovered attempts by a Taiwanese American who was a former Boeing company engineer to pass secret transmission equipment to China.
"We alerted the FBI to this case," Wang said.
Besides domestic intelligence focusing on the threat from China, Taiwan's Investigation Bureau also works to combat drug trafficking, organized crime, counterfeiting and money laundering.
Wang said the bureau has 2,300 employees of whom several hundred are involved exclusively in Chinese counterintelligence operations.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the