Lamentable though it may be, news last week that Central Police University associate professor Wu Chang-yu (吳彰裕) had been taken in on suspicion of passing information about dissidents to China was not shocking. However, this incident did bring into sharp contrast the dawn of a new era of Chinese “espionage” in Taiwan.
There is nothing new to espionage operations by China targeting the Taiwanese military, security apparatus, political parties and high-tech sector. Over the years, a number of Taiwanese have been caught spying for Beijing. The arrest and sentencing this year of General Lo Hsien-che (羅賢哲) for providing military secrets to China is but the latest and most prominent case in a long series of spy operations.
While it is difficult to gauge the severity of Chinese spy activity targeting Taiwan, as we only know of the cases where an agent was caught, it is safe to assume it is serious.
What is now changing — and Wu’s arrest could be the opening shot — is the context in which Chinese espionage is occurring. From 1949 until the beginning of the 21st century, China had limited opportunities to conduct human intelligence gathering on Taiwan.
This was mainly the result of policies by Taipei that substantially constrained opportunities for contact in Taiwan. As such, recruitment usually occurred in a third country. As Taiwan slowly opened to Chinese visitors and investment from the 1990s on, the opportunities for contact increased commensurately.
Following his entry into the Presidential Office in May 2008, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) forced the gates open and allowed an unprecedented number of Chinese, from tourists to senior Chinese Communist Party officials, to visit Taiwan, while quickly intensifying contact between almost every sector of government, society and business. So sudden was the shift that Taiwan’s national security apparatus did not have the wherewithal to address the new challenges created by this policy. As a result, not only did the opportunities for Chinese intelligence officers to conduct espionage in Taiwan grow exponentially, the sheer number of potential acts of espionage made most of them impossible to detect by a counterintelligence apparatus that remains configured to deal with a threat matrix that no longer exists.
We should also note, as author David Wise shows us in his book Tiger Trap, that Chinese espionage differs substantially from how it is understood in the West. The Chinese intelligence apparatus rarely pays for information and its approach to data gathering is much more subtle. Rather than have one agent collect information on a target, China will send 1,000 individuals and ask each to pick up a grain of salt, to refer to the analogy often used to describe Chinese espionage. Each grain is then added to the others and analyzed after it is returned to China.
More often than not, “sources” are not even aware they are providing Beijing with sensitive information, given that a large share of Chinese intelligence collection takes place in a business or academic context. China, furthermore, is very patient in collecting information and adopts a strategy of gradualism with its “sources,” taking them a little deeper one seemingly innocuous question at a time.
Defending his actions, Wu told prosecutors that the information he passed on to his handlers was not confidential. However, the “common” information he gave the Chinese was likely only a small component of a target picture Chinese intelligence was drawing of its targets.
As more Chinese visit, invest and study in Taiwan, China’s ability to penetrate Taiwanese society and gather intelligence will only rise. How a nation detects espionage when it doesn’t even look like espionage is a challenge Taiwanese will have to learn to deal with. Alarmingly, this is a challenge that very few countries have succeeded in addressing successfully.
In 2020, then-US president Donald Trump’s administration banned Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung from manufacturing advanced chips for Chinese companies on the Entity List such as Huawei. Last year, US President Joe Biden’s administration announced that exports of high-performance computing chips from the US to China require approval; sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China that can be used to produce logic chips at or below the 14/16-nanometer technology node, DRAM chips with a half-pitch less than or equal to 18 nanometers and NAND chips with 128 or more layers also require approval; and all US citizens or permanent
The Twenty-Four Histories (中國廿四史) is a collection of official Chinese dynastic histories from Records of the Grand Historian (史記) to the History of the Ming Dynasty (明史) that cover the time from the legendary Yellow Emperor (黃帝) to the Chongzhen Emperor (崇禎), the last Ming emperor. History is written by the victors. These histories are not merely records of the rise and fall of emperors, they also demonstrate the ways in which conquerors embellished their own achievements while deriding those of the conquered. The history written by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is no exception. The PRC presents its
In August 2013, Reuters reported that Beijing had been gaining soft power with investment commitments and trade with countries in Latin America. However, instead of jumping on the chance to make new allies, China stalled requests to establish diplomatic relations with the countries to avoid galling Taiwanese voters. Beijing was also courting then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), and the tactic left China with a trump card if cross-strait relations turned cool. China had rebuffed at least five countries’ requests to switch diplomatic recognition to Beijing, the report said, quoting a China analyst. Honduras could become the ninth diplomatic ally, and also the fifth
OpenAI has announced a major upgrade to the technology that underpins ChatGPT, the seemingly magical online tool that professionals have been using to draft e-mails, write blog posts and more. If you think of ChatGPT as a car, the new language model known as GPT-4 adds a more powerful engine. The old ChatGPT could only read text. The new ChatGPT can look at a photograph of the contents of your fridge and suggest a dinner recipe. The old ChatGPT scored in the 10th percentile on the bar exam. The new one was in the 90th. In the hours since its release,
RSS