Only two of China’s 31 incentives for Taiwanese are new, national security officials said yesterday.
Beijing on Feb. 28 announced the incentives targeting Taiwanese businesses, civic groups, cultural workers and artists, but only two are new measures and the rest were either measures announced previously or extensions of existing measures, a security official said on condition of anonymity.
Beijing is bringing its “united front” tactics to the table to develop intermediaries who could speak for China, the source said.
As the incentives include funding for exchanges between Taiwanese and Chinese non-governmental organizations, it suggest that Beijing is trying to lure Taiwanese with financial benefits, the source said.
In addition to revising the National Security Act (國家安全法), national security authorities have responded to China’s stepped-up activity by establishing a surveillance program to monitor the connections and finances of a number of groups and individuals close to Beijing, the source said.
An investigation in December last year into the alleged involvement of New Party spokesman Wang Ping-chung (王炳忠) in an espionage case connected to convicted Chinese spy Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭) found that Wang had received US$200,000 from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office.
Since the inauguration of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) Democratic Progressive Party administration in May 2016, China has provided funding or sponsored activities for specific groups in Taiwan, such as Aborigines, rural communities, religious groups and criminal organizations in a bid to develop local networks or instigate protests to influence elections and compromise Taiwan’s national security, the source said.
By nosing its way into Taiwanese non-governmental groups, Beijing is developing proxies in Taiwan to execute its policies, the source added.
One of the two incentives that are new allows for cooperation on sharing credit information between banking sectors.
Taiwanese and Chinese bankers have proposed establishing a credit-information sharing mechanism, but the Financial Supervisory Commission has rejected it due to concerns over Beijing using personal information for political and surveillance purposes.
China’s announcement last year that it would develop industrial parks in central, western and northeastern China targeting cross-strait cooperation to encourage Taiwanese businesses to move to those areas and participate in its Belt and Road Initiative was seen as a bid to counter Tsai’s New Southbound Policy by encouraging underperforming Taiwanese businesses to connect with Southeast Asian nations under the Belt and Road framework, the source said.
Taiwanese businesses would be able to pay lower social insurance premiums under Beijing’s incentive program, they said, adding that the effectiveness of the policy remains to be seen.
While Beijing has announced that 12 incentives were being offered exclusively to Taiwanese businesses, the ability to participate in the “Made in China 2025” program, infrastructure construction and government procurement was extended to all foreign businesses last year, the source said.
According to a Chinese tax law implemented in 2008, a 15 percent tax benefit is extended to Chinese and international firms with advanced and innovative technology, and not exclusively to Taiwanese companies, the source added.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has