Despite warming cross-strait ties, China continues to engage in “aggressive espionage activities” against Taiwan, says a report to the US Congress.
In the past year alone, Taipei officials have arrested five former military officers for spying.
One of these cases is particularly damaging, involving a former Taiwanese navy commander who is suspected of selling classified submarine nautical charts and other information about the waters surrounding the nation to China.
“These cases underscore the breadth and depth of China’s espionage activities against Taiwan and demonstrate Taiwan’s vulnerability to Chinese espionage,” the report says. A draft copy of the annual report by the congressionally appointed US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has been obtained by the Taipei Times. The final report will be formally released later this month.
Former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) director William Stanton is quoted in the report as saying that espionage cases have been harmful not only because of the loss of classified information, “but also because their success and frequency serves to undermine US confidence in security cooperation with Taiwan.”
Other AIT officials told the commission that the Chinese espionage threat to Taiwan was “a real concern” and that the US had raised it with Taiwan “at the highest levels.”
The draft report also says that China conducts extensive cyberoperations against the government and corporate networks. For example, the report says, China targeted the publicly accessible Web sites of Taiwan’s National Security Bureau 3.34 million times last year.
By way of defense, Taiwan is increasing its budget for cyberwarfare, integrating it into the nation’s routine training exercises and adding a fourth unit to the Communication Electronics and Information Bureau. In addition, Taiwan is building an experimental facility that will simulate cyberattacks on the nation’s critical infrastructure to help train cyberdefenders.
The report says that warming ties between China and Taiwan are raising concerns for Washington and Taipei. Increasing cross-strait economic integration breaks down barriers and ties Taiwan closer to China, the draft report says.
“This could strengthen Beijing’s bargaining power over Taipei and allow Beijing to make progress toward its long-term goal of unification,” it says. “Responding to these concerns, officials from Taiwan’s National Security Council insisted to the Commission that Taipei’s economic engagement with Beijing is carefully calibrated to promote both Taiwan’s economic growth and continued autonomy.”
Nevertheless, the report stresses that counterintelligence risks to Taiwan and US military information in Taiwan are increasing as cross-strait ties expand and Chinese citizens visit in greater numbers.
“Chinese intelligence agencies now have greater access to Taiwan and better opportunities to conduct intelligence operations against Taiwan[ese] citizens both in Taiwan and China,” the report says. “As the cross-strait military balance of power continues to shift in China’s favor, Taipei may seek to develop closer political ties with Washington and to acquire additional US arms and related military assistance.”
It concludes: “Taiwan’s diminishing ability to maintain a credible capability could provide incentives and create opportunities for Beijing to take on greater risk in its approach to cross-strait relations, including pressuring Taipei to move toward political talks or using military force to achieve political objectives.”
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
RSS