Taiwan is growing more wary of criminal influence in China and is considering stricter punishments on human traffickers across the Taiwan Strait.
Vice Minister of Justice Tang Chin-chuan (湯金全) told a news conference last month that his ministry was thinking of revising the Statute Governing the Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (台灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) to impose harsher punishments for human trafficking.
But Tang did not elaborate on the details.
According to the 79th provision of the statute, those convicted of trafficking in humans can receive up to seven years in jail.
Because of the lack of cooperation between the two sides, a growing number of criminals in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are joining forces to commit crimes such as human smuggling, drug trafficking, fraud, money laundering and kidnapping, police said.
Cooperation between local criminals and accomplices offshore has become more common in recent years as a result of frequent cross-strait exchanges, posing serious risks to personal safety and social order on both sides, police said.
Cooperation is critical to fighting cross-strait crime, but political differences have hindered these efforts, police said.
In addition, Ministry of Justice officials said, Chinese hackers have intensified attacks against Taiwan-based Web sites, making organized Internet crime a major headache for the authorities.
Since the beginning of the year, Chinese hackers have regularly intruded into Taiwanese and Japanese Web sites, they said.
They said China was the leading source of troublemakers in cyberspace.
In contrast to China's reluctance to cooperate in wiping out Internet crime, Taiwan has been very active in the area, the officials said, adding that in 2003, the Ministry of Justice received 32 requests for assistance filed from overseas, of which 25 received help.
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