Retired military officers planning to attend the Whampoa Military Academy centennial celebrations in China could pose a national security risk to Taiwan, an official said yesterday.
Whampoa Military Academy was founded in 1924 by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Guangzhou, China. Taiwanese and Chinese armed forces both lay claim to the institution’s lineage.
Taiwan and China are expected to hold rivaling centennial events later this month.
Photo: Taipei Times
Retired Taiwanese officers attending Beijng’s ceremony would be asked to get residency documents, driver’s licenses and bank accounts in China, the official said on condition of anonymity.
These veterans would be given cellphones with telecom subscriptions and predownloaded applications, they said.
China claimed these measures were intended to give the veterans the means to travel by air and high-speed rail, the official said.
This is a pretext, they said, adding that the bank accounts, devices and apps are aimed at enabling Chinese espionage as Taipei cannot monitor China’s financial institutions or telecom system, they said.
The Taiwanese veterans would give China the necessary information to register as Chinese nationals living in the “Taiwan area,” same as Hong Kong and Macau residents, the official said.
The request for identity documents is a bureaucratic maneuver aimed at upholding the narrative that Taiwan is a part of China, they said.
The retired officers’ itinerary — a product of the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee — would feature World War II monuments, a memorial for the Nanjing Massacre, and the academy’s former site, a source with knowledge of the matter said.
The selection of these sites was designed to build a narrative saying Taiwan and China’s militaries are the same entity, and Japan is the common enemy for the two sides across the Taiwan Strait, they said.
The Taiwanese officers attending China’s celebrations were people who took specialist courses at the academy and not Whampoa graduates, the source said, adding that none of them rose to general officer rank.
China said its Whampoa event is to draw more than 3,000 retired Taiwanese officers, but Taiwanese officials put the figure at fewer than 100.
More than 10,000 active and retired officers would attend Taiwan’s Whampoa event at the Military Academy in Kaohsiung, Veterans Affairs Council Minister Yen De-fa (嚴德發) said.
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