Taiwan on alert for Chinese spies before election

By William Foreman

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP): Thousands of people from China have visited Taiwan in the past decade. Some do academic research, others see relatives; many just disappear.

It's the missing mainlanders that Taiwanese security officials are worried about in the runup to the March 18 presidential election.

Taiwan has always been wary of Chinese efforts to send in spies. Some war scenarios say Beijing would use the agents to create instability, giving China an excuse to send in troops to restore order. The mainland agents, so the thinking goes, would sabotage computer networks, spread disinformation and direct invading troops.

Although Taiwan's first direct presidential vote in 1996 didn't cause any social disruption, next month's could be different. For the first time in Taiwanese history, there's a good chance the Nationalist Party could lose its 50-year grip on the presidency.

This possibility presents Taiwanese with one of the greatest challenges to their young democracy: the peaceful, stable transfer of power to an opposition party. However, the Nationalists have graciously accepted defeat in local elections, and so far there are no signs the March vote would be different.

Still, Wang Kuang-yu, director of the Investigation Bureau, has urged Taiwanese to be alert for signs of Chinese sabotage or infiltration.

Wang recently said 14,000 mainlanders have visited Taiwan in the past three years, and about 370 of them have been expelled for unspecified activities.

More than 1,400 Chinese visitors remain unaccounted for, according to the National Police Administration. Wang would not speculate on what the missing mainlanders might be doing.

Most of the illegal immigrants are probably poor mainlanders who came to Taiwan looking for jobs, said Andrew Yang, a Taipei- based military analyst at the Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a think-tank with ties to the Defense Ministry.

"So far there's no clear evidence to show they have a particular political mission to conduct sabotage or create any disturbances," he said.

But in October, the government deported eight mainlanders who were working illegally for a company that supplied janitors to major firms, including those in the Hsinchu Science-based Industrial Park -- Taiwan's Silicon Valley.

Two of the mainlanders were working at an Investigation Bureau construction site, said a bureau spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Although the bureau had no evidence, there were reasons to suspect the men might have been spying, he said.

There has been media speculation that Beijing might have plans to send in computer hackers who could manipulate election results and set off riots between political parties.

But Yang said such a scheme would backfire. "If caught hacking to disturb the election votes, China would be blamed by the international community for meddling in Taiwan's democracy," he said.

Taiwan and China split amid civil war in 1949, and Beijing considers the democratic island to be a breakaway province.

Although the armies of both China and Taiwan are well-armed and ready for war, covert operations between the two sides are extremely low-key. Occasionally, China will arrest a Taiwanese businessman and accuse him of spying. But assassination attempts or China-sponsored terrorist acts in Taiwan are almost unheard of.

Security around Taiwanese leaders is surprisingly lax. Reporters don't even have to walk through a metal detector or be searched before entering the presidential office building. This is in sharp contrast to the Koreas, where airliners have been bombed and commandos have had gunbattles in the streets of Seoul.

"The North Korean approach has been too crude and has put the South Korean people on alert," said opposition lawmaker Parris Chang, who has urged security officials to step up counterespionage measures.

He said Beijing may have lulled the Taiwanese into complacency and that China could take advantage of a Taiwanese law that would suspend the vote if a candidate dies in an accident or is assassinated.

"That could cause a domestic disturbance so we're worried," Chang said.