China’s counter-espionage Law amended on Saturday last week and Foreign Investment Law enacted on Jan. 1 last year were designed to work together.
Article 4, Paragraph 3 of the Counter-Espionage Law gives a broad definition of acts of espionage, ie: “Activities carried out, instigated or funded by foreign institutions, organizations and individuals other than espionage organizations and their representatives, or in which domestic institutions, organizations or individuals collude, to steal, pry into, purchase or illegally provide state secrets, intelligence and other documents, data, materials or items related to national security, or in which state employees are incited, enticed, coerced or bought over to turn traitor.”
This definition provides law enforcement officials with greater administrative discretion and “free evaluation of evidence” to define virtually anyone as a spy if they want to. Anyone can become a spy in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) eyes at any time, even through perfectly innocent or innocuous activities such as conventional market research or travel photography.
This definition is similar to articles 34 and 35 of the Foreign Investment Law. Article 34 says: “The state shall establish a foreign investment information reporting system. Foreign investors or foreign-funded enterprises shall submit the investment information to competent departments for commerce through the enterprise registration system and the enterprise credit information publicity system.”
Article 35 adds: “The state shall establish a safety review system for foreign investment, under which the safety review shall be conducted for any foreign investment affecting or having the possibility to affect national security.”
Articles 34 and 35 provide the CCP with greater administrative discretion and room for interpretation to call anyone a “national security violator” if it wants. The lack of implementation regulations for the two articles would allow Beijing to force foreign investors to submit operational plans and business secrets to meet its requirements for security review.
The two acts share the characteristic of “Chinese rule of law” — articles without details about how they are to be implemented. This characteristic gives officials room for “power rent-seeking,” which is not only a breeding ground for corruption, but also a political leader’s tool to purge perceived enemies.
It is ordinary people and investors who will suffer in the end.
Taiwanese should take precautionary measures when coducting business or traveling in China to avoid unexpected jeopardy.
Yu Kung is a Taiwanese entrepreneur working in China.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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