Taiwan on Tuesday dismissed new spying allegations by China as a further attempt to smear the government of the self-governing island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory.
The remarks follow a report on Monday night by Chinese broadcaster CCTV featuring a taped confession from a man identified as Cheng Yu-chin, the second such report in as many days.
On Sunday, CCTV broadcast a confession by a man identified as Li Mengju, whose name is also spelled Lee Meng-chu, who like Cheng said he had been working to destabilise China and harm the ruling Communist Party’s reputation.
In the same report, CCTV said security personnel had solved more than 100 spying cases as part of an initiative dubbed Operation Thunder 2020.
Taiwanese Premier Su Tseng-chang called the accusations an attempt by Beijing to “defame and create fear,” while the foreign ministry’s head of European affairs, Johnson Chiang, called the allegations “pure defamation and calumny”. CCTV’s airing of videoed confessions have prompted lawsuits abroad amid accusations that the accounts were coerced and that the broadcaster is merely a propaganda arm of the Communist Party.