00:00Accusations of espionage are flying around Taiwan's presidential office.
00:05Several more people with deep connections to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party
00:09and the president himself are being accused of spying for China.
00:13Rhys Ayers is live with us in Taipei with more on this developing story.
00:18Rhys, who is being accused in this spy saga?
00:25There were three individuals identified by a report by Mirror Media, surnamed Qiu, Huang
00:32and Wu, all with various positions of authority and levels of access within the Democratic
00:39Progressive Party and also within that building behind me, the presidential office here in
00:45Taipei.
00:46They've all been accused of leaking sensitive information to China and all this comes just
00:51one day after a former aide to an ex-legislative house speaker, Yoshi Kun, was released on
00:59bail.
01:00So let's zoom in on one of the people named in that report so we can get a better sense
01:05of just how deep this goes.
01:07So Mr. Wu, he had been working for the DPP central headquarters for a long time, since
01:14before even Tsai Ing-wen, the former president, was elected in 2016.
01:19He then worked under Lai Ching-de when he was vice president in 2022.
01:25He was then carried on with the president when he assumed office in 2024, acting as
01:30an aide to the president himself.
01:33So these are people who have really direct access to the leadership of Taiwan.
01:40Now according to that report, Wu's colleagues said that soon after Lunar New Year in February,
01:46he kind of disappeared.
01:48His Facebook account was deactivated and we now know that was probably because he was
01:53being investigated.
01:55Wu and the others accused currently being held incommunicado pending the prosecutor's
02:02investigations.
02:06And has there been any response from the presidential office?
02:09All four of them were affiliated with the DPP, right?
02:14Yeah, they were indeed.
02:16The presidential office has released a rather generic statement.
02:20They said that they don't comment on any individual cases or insinuations made by politicians.
02:28And they said that anyone found spying will face severe punishment.
02:33They then went on to say that China is increasingly trying to infiltrate Taiwan, but recognized
02:40an urgent need to strengthen the country's national security legislation.
02:46This all comes less than a month after President Lai Ching-de held a press conference in the
02:53office behind me.
02:54A very serious announcement on this very issue, where he said that Taiwan needs to respond
03:01to China's growing attempts to infiltrate the country, including through recruiting
03:07political spies.
03:09And then he laid out a long series of measures that he said Taiwan must do to protect its
03:15sovereignty.
03:16The opposition, Kuomintang, have also jumped onto this story, accusing the DPP of allowing
03:23communist spies into Taiwanese politics, which is a slightly ironic twist of fate, given
03:30that it's the general perception in Taiwan that it's the KMT that have closer ties to Beijing.
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