Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Draft amendments to allow people accused of spying for China to be indicted on foreign aggression charges and to allow political parties to be indicted on organized crime charges was approved yesterday by the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee.

Prosecutors have traditionally cited the National Security Act (國家安全法) when indicting alleged Chinese spies because the treason and foreign aggression offenses stipulated in the Criminal Code only apply to crimes committed on behalf of an “enemy state.”

Taiwanese activist Lee Ming-che (李明哲) was on Tuesday sentenced to five years in prison by a court in Yueyang in China’s Hunan Province.

At about the same time, Beijing began a campaign to evict what it calls the city’s “low-end population” — people with low income or low levels of education, most of them workers from other provinces.

These two things, although seemingly unrelated, are equally revealing of how the regime of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) approaches government.