A special court is needed to handle national security-related cases following discoveries of extensive Chinese espionage operations, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday.
The council made the statement after seven retired Taiwanese military personnel, members of the Rehabilitation Alliance Party, were accused of receiving funding from China and recruiting veterans as key members of the party.
The party, which has been ordered to dissolve, has also been accused of recruiting people to contest legislative elections, photographing the American Institute in Taiwan’s headquarters and four military bases, drawing maps of the locations and giving them to China and planning to build armed forces to cooperate with China in the event of an invasion.
Photo: Chen Yu-fu, Taipei Times
“We have been reminding our people that the purpose of the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is to annihilate the Republic of China (Taiwan), which has been its goal since 1949,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesman Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) told reporters at the council’s weekly news conference. “While it is necessary to continue countering ‘united front’ and infiltration efforts, the [Rehabilitation Alliance Party] case shows that there are many loopholes in the legal system when it comes to national security issues.”
Most defendants in national security cases receive relatively light sentences, as judges are often overly fixated on the language the defendants use, he said.
For example, the Rehabilitation Alliance Party members said they are a social group called the “New Fourth Army Society” dedicated to the study of an entity of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) army during World War II, Liang said.
The name does not evoke the idea that it is affiliated with the CCP, and judges might not consider the exchange of money for information to be espionage, he said.
“Its members hide their identities and there is no way to verify who they are with China,” Liang said. “While the Investigation Bureau is working hard to crack down on Chinese espionage operations, we hope that the judicial system would advance by treating national security incidents as special cases and establish a dedicated court to review them.”
In other matters, Liang said that two Chinese academics who study Taiwan are visiting to meet with experts at the Institute for National Policy Research and the Foundation of Asia-Pacific Peace Studies.
The council would arrange an opportunity to meet with the academics, he said, but refused to disclose any specific matters that it would discuss, simply saying they are cross-strait issues.
Separately, the Investigation Bureau on Wednesday said that there are Taiwanese who hold Chinese ID cards and Chinese household registration certificates, adding that it has informed the Ministry of the Interior about the matter.
If a Taiwanese has household registration in China, or holds a Chinese passport or ID card, the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (兩岸人民關係條例) stipulates that their household registration in Taiwan be canceled, meaning they would lose their citizenship rights, including to vote and to access the National Health Insurance system.
Income earned by Chinese in Taiwan would be targeted by tax collectors in China, the bureau said.
In a YouTube video discussing China’s “united front” tactics produced by Taiwanese rapper Chen Po-yuan (陳柏源) and YouTuber Pa Chiung (八炯), Lin Jincheng (林金城), head of the Taiwan Youth Entrepreneurship Park in Quanzhou in China’s Fujian Province, said that 200,000 Taiwanese hold Chinese ID cards.
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
Taiwan yesterday denied Chinese allegations that its military was behind a cyberattack on a technology company in Guangzhou, after city authorities issued warrants for 20 suspects. The Guangzhou Municipal Public Security Bureau earlier yesterday issued warrants for 20 people it identified as members of the Information, Communications and Electronic Force Command (ICEFCOM). The bureau alleged they were behind a May 20 cyberattack targeting the backend system of a self-service facility at the company. “ICEFCOM, under Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, directed the illegal attack,” the warrant says. The bureau placed a bounty of 10,000 yuan (US$1,392) on each of the 20 people named in
INDO-PACIFIC REGION: Royal Navy ships exercise the right of freedom of navigation, including in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea, the UK’s Tony Radakin told a summit Freedom of navigation in the Indo-Pacific region is as important as it is in the English Channel, British Chief of the Defence Staff Admiral Tony Radakin said at a summit in Singapore on Saturday. The remark came as the British Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the HMS Prince of Wales, is on an eight-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific region as head of an international carrier strike group. “Upholding the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, and with it, the principles of the freedom of navigation, in this part of the world matters to us just as it matters in the
The High Court yesterday found a New Taipei City woman guilty of charges related to helping Beijing secure surrender agreements from military service members. Lee Huei-hsin (李慧馨) was sentenced to six years and eight months in prison for breaching the National Security Act (國家安全法), making illegal compacts with government employees and bribery, the court said. The verdict is final. Lee, the manager of a temple in the city’s Lujhou District (蘆洲), was accused of arranging for eight service members to make surrender pledges to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in exchange for money, the court said. The pledges, which required them to provide identification
RSS