For seven decades Taiwan has weathered the full gambit of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-backed espionage. Of the many tactics employed by the CCP, the most potent and damaging is its long-term strategy to infiltrate and gain influence over Taiwanese political and social institutions.
The recruitment of informants and influencers occurs at a grassroots level, often via temple associations and proxy organizations run by members of Taiwan’s organized crime world, such as Chinese Unification Promotion Party founder Chang An-le (張安樂) — also known as the “White Wolf” — but also extends to Taiwan’s corporate lobby, and all the way up to politicians and high-ranking military officers.
Other nations are belatedly waking up to the threat of Chinese infiltration, which appears to have been executed on an industrial scale, as revealed in multiple reports last week.
On Tuesday last week, US Web site Axios reported that from 2011 to 2015, a Chinese national named Christine Fang, or Fang Fang (方芳), targeted several US mayors and politicians in honeytrap-style operations. US officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have said that Fang was cultivating relationships with rising US political stars as part of a long-term strategy to gain influence over potential congressional members. One of Fang’s targets was US Representative Eric Swalwell.
On the other side of the Atlantic, British newspaper the Mail on Sunday on Saturday published an investigation into a leaked database of 1.95 million registered CCP members from 2016.
The investigation revealed that registered party members are involved in sensitive military research at British universities and are working at prominent companies in the UK, including the banks HSBC and Standard Chartered, defense contractors Rolls-Royce, Boeing, Airbus and Thales, and pharmaceutical behemoths Pfizer and AstraZeneca. The number of CCP members in these companies ranges from dozens up to hundreds, it said.
The database was leaked by a Chinese dissident and passed to the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international grouping of legislators concerned about the activities of China’s government.
Even more alarming, registered party members are working at British consulates in China, including one at the British consulate in Shanghai who works one floor below a team of intelligence officers. The concern, according to a security source quoted in the article, is that the team’s cover could have been blown.
Back in the US, Di Dongsheng (翟東昇), a professor of international relations at Renmin University, claimed in a video of a talk delivered on Nov. 28 at an event in Shanghai that Beijing has “old friends” at the top of the US’ “core inner circle” of power, including within Wall Street. After the video went viral, it was quickly removed from Di’s page on the Chinese microblogging site Sina Weibo.
The video could simply be a disinformation designed to discredit the US public’s confidence in the elections — Di hinted that Beijing has kompromat on US president-elect Joe Biden through his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China. However, it could be credible, with media reports last week saying that federal authorities, including the FBI, are investigating Hunter Biden’s business dealings in China, in addition to a laptop computer that he had used.
Similar attempts to infiltrate democracies — including Australia, New Zealand and Canada — have received extensive coverage in the past few years. It is likely that cases currently in the public domain are just the tip of the iceberg.
Taiwan’s intelligence agencies have amassed a wealth of counterespionage experience, accumulated through decades of rooting out Chinese spies. The government should consider providing discreet offers of assistance, such as training and intelligence sharing, with affected nations, to leverage this valuable national asset.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) is expected to be summoned by the Taipei City Police Department after a rally in Taipei on Saturday last week resulted in injuries to eight police officers. The Ministry of the Interior on Sunday said that police had collected evidence of obstruction of public officials and coercion by an estimated 1,000 “disorderly” demonstrators. The rally — led by Huang to mark one year since a raid by Taipei prosecutors on then-TPP chairman and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — might have contravened the Assembly and Parade Act (集會遊行法), as the organizers had
Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) last week made a rare visit to the Philippines, which not only deepened bilateral economic ties, but also signaled a diplomatic breakthrough in the face of growing tensions with China. Lin’s trip marks the second-known visit by a Taiwanese foreign minister since Manila and Beijing established diplomatic ties in 1975; then-minister Chang Hsiao-yen (章孝嚴) took a “vacation” in the Philippines in 1997. As Taiwan is one of the Philippines’ top 10 economic partners, Lin visited Manila and other cities to promote the Taiwan-Philippines Economic Corridor, with an eye to connecting it with the Luzon
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
RSS