Academics and lawmakers on Tuesday said the government should consider reinstating military trials during peacetime or amending laws to better deter military espionage after an army colonel was indicted for working for China.
The Kaohsiung District Prosecutors’ Office on Tuesday charged former army colonel Hsiang Te-en (向德恩) with corruption, accusing him of pledging allegiance to China and receiving payment from Chinese operatives to work as a spy, but said there was insufficient evidence to charge him with espionage.
Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the Institute of National Defense and Security Research, said that military espionage poses a serious threat to national security.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The Code of Court Martial Procedure (軍事審判法) only applies to active military personnel who commit crimes under the Criminal Code of the Armed Forces (陸海空軍刑法) during wartime. During peacetime, military personnel are tried in civilian courts and serve sentences in civilian prisons.
Su urged the government to thoroughly review the reinstatement of military trials or at least invite military prosecutors to participate in espionage investigations.
Reinstating military trials during peacetime for active personnel would improve troop discipline and combat readiness, and deter espionage, he said.
Hsiang, a 49-year-old former head of the Kaohsiung-based Army Infantry Training Command’s Operations Research and Development Division, allegedly received NT$40,000 per month from Oct. 31, 2019, to January to work as a spy, prosecutors said.
Former reporter Shao Wei-chiang (邵維強) allegedly paid Hsiang NT$560,000 for information, they said.
At Shao’s direction, Hsiang in January 2020 posed for a photograph wearing his military uniform while holding a handwritten note pledging his allegiance to China, prosecutors said.
The note read: “I, Hsiang Te-en, hereby pledge to support cross-strait peaceful unification. I will do my best at my current post to fulfill the glorious task of pushing for peaceful unification for the motherland.”
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said the case exposed major negligence in the military’s internal espionage prevention and detection system.
While Lo did not explicitly call for the resumption of military trials, he did say that laws should be updated to encourage loyalty in the military and ensure that spies could be charged with treason and face tougher penalties.
On Nov. 9, Minister of National Defense Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正) told legislators in a question-and-answer session that he “personally agreed” with reinstating military trials, but said it was up to legislators to do so.
At the session, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Sz-Huai (吳斯懷) said that Ministry of National Defense data showed that about 29 of 32 crimes committed by active-duty military personnel brought to trial over the past five years did not result in convictions by civilian courts.
Wu said that this has led to a decline in discipline, morale and leadership in the military.
The ministry late on Tuesday said that Hsiang had been suspended from duty, pending his trial.
Hsiang has been held in custody since his arrest on Sept. 26.
Shao, who is also a retired army lieutenant, had been a Kinmen correspondent for Taipei-based China Television from 1993 to July 2019.
On Oct. 7, Kinmen County prosecutors indicted Shao for bribery and contravening the National Security Act (國家安全法). He is being held in Kinmen.
The Code of Court Martial Procedure was amended to end military trials of officers in peacetime following the death of Hung Chung-chiu (洪仲丘) in July 2013.
Hung was found dead while in detention in the army’s 269th Mechanized Infantry Brigade barracks under suspicious circumstances.
The military investigation led to the arrest and questioning of several officials. A court subsequently found 13 officials guilty of various charges and handed down prison sentences of up to eight months.
The sentences were seen as too lenient, leading for calls that such cases be tried in civilian courts.
Hung’s death sparked the resignation of then-minister of national defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱), an apology from then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and public protests, followed by subsequent reforms that sought more transparency from the armed forces.
GREAT POWER COMPETITION: Beijing views its military cooperation with Russia as a means to push back against the joint power of the US and its allies, an expert said A recent Sino-Russian joint air patrol conducted over the waters off Alaska was designed to counter the US military in the Pacific and demonstrated improved interoperability between Beijing’s and Moscow’s forces, a national security expert said. National Defense University associate professor Chen Yu-chen (陳育正) made the comment in an article published on Wednesday on the Web site of the Journal of the Chinese Communist Studies Institute. China and Russia sent four strategic bombers to patrol the waters of the northern Pacific and Bering Strait near Alaska in late June, one month after the two nations sent a combined flotilla of four warships
THE TOUR: Pope Francis has gone on a 12-day visit to Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore. He was also invited to Taiwan The government yesterday welcomed Pope Francis to the Asia-Pacific region and said it would continue extending an invitation for him to visit Taiwan. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs made the remarks as Pope Francis began a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Monday. He is to travel about 33,000km by air to visit Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, and would arrive back in Rome on Friday next week. It would be the longest and most challenging trip of Francis’ 11-year papacy. The 87-year-old has had health issues over the past few years and now uses a wheelchair. The ministry said
TAIWANESE INNOVATION: The ‘Seawool’ fabric generates about NT$200m a year, with the bulk of it sourced by clothing brands operating in Europe and the US Growing up on Taiwan’s west coast where mollusk farming is popular, Eddie Wang saw discarded oyster shells transformed from waste to function — a memory that inspired him to create a unique and environmentally friendly fabric called “Seawool.” Wang remembered that residents of his seaside hometown of Yunlin County used discarded oyster shells that littered the streets during the harvest as insulation for their homes. “They burned the shells and painted the residue on the walls. The houses then became warm in the winter and cool in the summer,” the 42-year-old said at his factory in Tainan. “So I was
‘LEADERS’: The report highlighted C.C. Wei’s management at TSMC, Lisa Su’s decisionmaking at AMD and the ‘rock star’ status of Nvidia’s Huang Time magazine on Thursday announced its list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (AI), which included Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) chairman and chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家), Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) and AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰). The list is divided into four categories: Leaders, Innovators, Shapers and Thinkers. Wei and Huang were named in the Leaders category. Other notable figures in the Leaders category included Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta CEO and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Su was listed in the Innovators category. Time highlighted Wei’s
RSS