Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

In what Michael Driscoll, the head of the FBI’s New York field office called a “blatant violation of our national sovereignty,” two Chinese men allegedly set up a secret police station in the city.

The station apparently performed public services such as helping Chinese renew their Chinese driver’s license. It also helped the Chinese government locate a rights advocate of Chinese descent, among other services to Beijing.

China is using military drills, conducted without warning and using live ammunition, as a pretext for further encroachment on Taiwanese territory, National Defense University researcher Ma Chen-kun (馬振坤) said on Tuesday. The use of live ammunition meant the drills risked developing into combat, and likely represented a scenario in which Beijing could authorize the use of military force to deter “Taiwanese independence activities,” he said.

China used the drills to “further approach the 12 nautical mile [22.2km] baseline of Taiwan’s territorial waters,” and could have been “a pretext to break into Taiwan’s 24 nautical mile contiguous zone,” he said.