Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Recent media reports have highlighted a critical national security case that concluded last year, revealing retired Taiwanese military personnel recruited by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were tasked with gathering intelligence on key military installations and the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), and, alarmingly, were implicated in a plot to establish an armed assassination unit.

That case represents an unprecedented escalation in the PRC’s infiltration tactics. The PRC’s evolving strategies, from manipulating internal narratives and employing “gray zone” tactics, to planning assassinations, underscore its intent to destabilize Taiwan’s institutional and societal frameworks. That progression reflects a deliberate and systematic approach to undermining Taiwan’s sovereignty and disrupting its social fabric. The involvement of retired military officers suggests potential contraventions of Criminal Code provisions on sedition and treason.

Cargo ships registered to Chinese shipping companies have allegedly destroyed undersea cables in a chain of instances across the globe, including the deliberate severance of multiple undersea cables in the waters outside Keelung Harbor by the Shunxing-39 (順興三九) before quickly leaving the area, making cross-national maritime policing particularly difficult to implement.

How do we enable processing and follow-up mechanisms to operate more effectively, let alone establish an early warning messaging system? How do we establish advanced maritime policing laws and conventions with friendly and like-minded nations nearby? These are an urgent priority that our national security departments must immediately focus on.