Amid family members of a late intelligence operative accusing the government of insufficiently compensating its intelligence personnel, critics recalled the notable case of Chou Ping (周冰), who was the nation’s first female officer promoted to major general in 1949.
At the time, Chou was responsible for recruiting agents behind enemy lines. In 1951, she was sent to Hong Kong for an operation, but was apprehended by Chinese authorities and the Taiwanese government disavowed any knowledge of her actions.
After her extradition to Taiwan in 1958, the government neither made public nor officially recognized her rank of major general until it provided her retirement certificate in 1984. The story of her work as a secret agent behind enemy lines was not made public until her death in 2011.
Critics also cited another case six years ago, in which a group of former Military Intelligence Bureau officers residing in Hong Kong said at a news conference that the government did not recognize its agents after their release from Chinese prisons, adding that some had only received US$10,000 to US$20,000 in compensation, despite having been arrested and jailed in China for more than 13 years.
The former officers said that the bureau did not consider them “on the job” while they were in prison, and in some instances even accused them of working for China.
Then-87-year-old Chou Kuo-kui (周國揆) said he was in 1957 sent on an intelligence gathering mission, but was arrested by Chinese twice.
The first time he was caught, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, for which Taiwan’s government paid him NT$3 million (US$91,047 at the current exchange rate) in compensation, Chou Kuo-kui said, but added that the second time he was caught in China and sentenced to a 15-year jail sentence, he received only NT$640,000 in compensation.
That translated to roughly NT$40,000 per year in prison, Chou said, adding that he did not think the government treated its intelligence operatives well.
Another officer, Chiang Chien-kuo (姜建國), said that he was arrested the moment he set foot in China from Hong Kong while on a mission to gather intelligence, adding that a Chinese counterpart at the time showed him surveillance footage of his dinner meeting with a bureau official.
“It was evident that the bureau was compromised and I was arrested because of a mole, but the compensation from the government was not reasonable considering the loss of my dignity,” Chiang said.
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:
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