A draft national security and counterintelligence bill and proposed anti-espionage legislation have recently kicked up dust due to public misgivings about their possible affect on human rights, as well as vociferous opposition from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
It is ironic that the KMT — the pioneer of ridding Taiwanese society of Communist spies, both real and presumed — would raise the banner of human rights, but more alarming is the party’s attempts to steer attention away from what is really at stake.
Giving the KMT the benefit of the doubt, concern about overreaching state surveillance power causing harm to freedoms and rights is real and palpable, and the tug-of-war between national security and civil liberties has been a recurring debate. That is why the Cabinet said it vetoed Ministry of Justice drafts that contained some unnerving articles, such as granting authorities easy access — with the signed consent of their superiors — to background information on suspected spies.
In response to concerns that setting up counterintelligence offices in security-sensitive state institutions would amount to a return of the White Terror-era “second personnel office” — which was embedded in all public institutions, including schools, and was responsible for vetting and monitoring civil servants and students — the Cabinet has firmly rejected rebuilding such a system, which one spokesperson pointed out was abolished by the first Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration.
According to local media, a more practical reason was also cited by a minister without portfolio reviewing the drafts: Extra agencies would lead to jurisdictional overlaps and unnecessary competition within the central government.
However, the rejection of the drafts should not be regarded as an endorsement of the view that there is no need for Taiwan to boost its counterespionage efforts.
Political scientist Fan Shih-ping (范世平), who has participated in the government’s forums on the institutionalization of counterintelligence efforts, said that the US and Japan have expressed concerns over Taiwan’s infiltration problem, which in turn has compromised their willingness to upgrade cooperation with Taipei in the wake of eight years of the China-friendly administration of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), which left the nation’s intelligence agencies porous.
As Minister of Justice Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) said, an executive order is all that is guiding the nation’s counterintelligence efforts, and national security-related laws are mainly focused on punishment, not prevention.
The new attempts at legislation attempt to clearly prescribe legal parameters to avoid possible abuses of power and to reinforce the nation’s ability to defend itself.
The KMT has criticized the controversies of a “letter of agreement” signed by universities and a former Chinese student suspected of being a spy as the DPP government’s ploy to move further away from China and consolidate the DPP’s “authoritarian rule.”
The government could justify its efforts to boost counterespionage and anti-infiltration capabilities without referring to those examples. However, when did requiring reciprocal respect, denouncing unilateral coercion and catching spies become as deplorable as “suppressing academic freedom” and “manufacturing cross-strait tensions?”
The espionage problem is real, as many cases, including one exposed yesterday, have shown. The problem with the KMT is that it has blurred national identity to align the Republic of China — a symbol that it has desperately guarded to the extent of resorting to terror — with the People’s Republic of China, at Taiwan’s expense.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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