Thirty Chinese military aircraft on Monday entered Taiwan’s southwestern air defense identification zone — the second-biggest single-day incursion this year.
The latest incident involved 22 fighter jets as well as electronic warfare aircraft, and anti-submarine and airborne early warning and control aircraft. They flew on a course close to the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Islands (Dongsha Islands, 東沙群島) and the strategically important Bashi Channel.
As per standard practice, Taiwan’s military scrambled interceptor jets, issued radio warnings and deployed defense missile systems to track the Chinese aircraft.
Such incursions are an overt display of Beijing’s unrelenting war of attrition against Taiwan and have become a regular occurrence over the past few years amid a military buildup under the direction of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平).
However, a covert war, conducted in the shadows, necessarily receives far less attention, yet it is every bit as significant and just as fiercely contested.
The Kaohsiung District Court yesterday sentenced Chang Pei-ning (張培凝), a former commander of the Navy Education, Training and Doctrine Development Command, to three years and 10 months in prison for running a spy ring and recruiting several high-ranking Taiwanese naval officers.
It is a classic case of the recruitment of a retired military officer by China’s intelligence apparatus. Chang was recruited by a Chinese spy named Xie Xizhang (謝錫璋), who started visiting Taiwan in 1997 posing as a Hong Kong businessman. After retiring from the navy in 2003, Chang partnered with a friend to export timber, copper and iron ore from Africa and Indonesia to China.
Xie met Chang over a meal in 2006 during one of his trips to Taiwan. He approached Chang by facilitating his business interests, introducing him to contacts in China, including a Chinese buyer of African timber. Following several meetings with members of the Chinese Communist Party, Chang was recruited by Xie and operated as a Chinese spy for more than 13 years before his arrest in 2019.
Chang used his personal network to contact middle and high-ranking serving and retired naval officers. His first target was a serving colonel, surnamed Han (韓), who was stationed at the Political Warfare Department of Marine Corps Headquarters. Funded by Xie, Chang arranged all-expenses-paid trips to South Korea and China for Han and his wife, but failed to recruit him.
Chang was more successful with He Chung-chi (何忠技), a high-ranking officer stationed at the Navy Command Headquarters, and his wife, Chuang Hsiu-yun (莊秀雲). Chang and Xie took the couple on a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Thailand and recruited them to help expand Xie’s spy network in the military.
Xie and Chang came unstuck in 2014 when they tried to recruit retired vice admiral Shen Po-chih (申伯之). Shen had served in a range of high-level positions and had commanded the presidential security detail. He would have possessed detailed knowledge about the inner workings of the armed forces and been a significant catch. However, Shen smelt a rat and apparently alerted the authorities.
Xie and Chang’s modus operandi is familiar: Softening up officers with drinks, meals and gifts, then ensnaring the target by paying for information. This is then used as blackmail to extract further intelligence.
In addition to likely national security breaches, the steady stream of espionage cases within the military damages morale and erodes the trust of Taiwan’s allies in the nation’s ability to defend itself.
The government must redouble its counterespionage efforts to crack down on spies and show the world that Taiwan is capable of protecting its secrets.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Many local news media last week reported that COVID-19 is back, citing doctors’ observations and the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) statistics. The CDC said that cases would peak this month and urged people to take preventive measures. Although COVID-19 has never been eliminated, it has become more manageable, and restrictions were dropped, enabling people to return to their normal way of life due to decreasing hospitalizations and deaths. In Taiwan, mandatory reporting of confirmed cases and home isolation ended in March last year, while the mask mandate at hospitals and healthcare facilities stopped in May. However, the CDC last week said the number