Taiwan's prosecutors have turned a military procurement fraud case into a national security prosecution, and the escalation exposes a deeper problem: the government is trying to purge Chinese components with a sledgehammer when the job calls for professional, targeted judgment.
Days before Taiwan's National Day on October 10, prosecutors in Taoyuan searched six locations linked to Jiin Ming Industry Co., a drone maker listed on the Taipei Exchange and regarded as part of Taiwan's "drone national team," the group of domestic firms the government is cultivating to supply the military. Investigators allege that Jiin Ming and its subsidiaries fitted military drones with China-made chips and camera lenses, then submitted false certificates of origin so the armed forces would accept the deliveries.
On October 9, the Taoyuan District Court ordered Vice Chairman and President Chien Hao-ting and business manager Chen Yang-cheng detained for two months and barred from contact with others. Both are suspected of violating the National Security Act, falsifying business records, and aggravated fraud. Jiin Ming has said its operations continue as normal and that it will cooperate with the investigation.
Drones Now Sit At The Heart Of Taiwan's Defense
The stakes are high. Russia's war in Ukraine and the US war with Iran have rewritten assumptions about modern combat, and drones have emerged as a decisive tool when one side is far weaker than the other in conventional forces. For Taiwan, which faces a vastly larger People's Liberation Army, asymmetric warfare is the core of its defense strategy.
The government plans to spend NT$44.2 billion (about US$1.48 billion) from 2025 to 2030 to build a domestic drone industry, while the military intends to field more than 200,000 drones of various types, a program worth hundreds of billions of New Taiwan dollars.
Because drones bear directly on national security, and because the National Security Act explicitly covers the use of Chinese components in military procurement, prosecuting the Jiin Ming case under that law is not unreasonable on its face. A closer and more practical look, however, reveals questions that are hard to define and harder to prove.
Three Questions Prosecutors Have Yet To Answer
The first is intent. Did Jiin Ming know the parts were made in China? Prosecutors say it did, and that it knowingly installed banned chips and lenses before filing false certificates of origin for military inspection.
The second is availability. How many non-Chinese alternatives to these chips and lenses actually exist? If the answer is very few, or none, the case looks very different.
The third, and most fundamental, is harm. What national security interest was damaged by putting these components into drones? If none, invoking the National Security Act is a serious misjudgment. The law carries far heavier penalties, and turning what is at most document forgery or a breach of tender rules into a major security case is using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Officials Have Every Incentive To Overreach
The logic of bureaucracy makes matters worse. Taiwan's society and policy now carry a strong anti-China orientation, and for officials concerned with protecting themselves, the safest course is to make "non-red" supply chain rules as strict as possible and simply ban everything. That, by and large, is what agencies are doing.
A case from earlier this year shows how far this has gone. A legislator revealed that electric buses run by Shin Shin Bus, an operator under the Veterans Affairs Council, and Ta Nan Bus used chips from HiSilicon, the semiconductor arm of China's Huawei, in their around-view monitoring systems. The council acknowledged the problem and moved to claim contractual damages from the supplier.
The episode bordered on the absurd. How much intelligence can one chip on a bus gather? Buses run on fixed public routes, and street scenes are hardly state secrets. Google Maps and Street View have long since photographed nearly every road in Taiwan.
Chinese Chips Are Already Everywhere In Taiwan
The industrial reality is even harder to escape. After decades of globalization, products assembled from hundreds or thousands of parts are effectively multinational. China accounts for roughly 30% of global manufacturing output, which makes stripping every Chinese-made part from a complex product extremely difficult, especially when the definition of "made in China" is itself open to dispute.
Treating every Chinese chip as a menace to be stamped out is impractical and self-defeating, and it cannot succeed. Chinese chips are already in Taiwanese homes and public spaces. Phones and wearables from Huawei, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo are in wide use, and even Apple's iPhones contain Chinese components and are assembled in China. Most household electronics, from televisions to robot vacuums, are made in China with Chinese chips inside.
Consider the claim that Chinese chips in electric buses endanger national security. Industry estimates put the number of chips in a battery electric vehicle at 1,500 to 3,000, and in a conventional gasoline car at 500 to 700. Most are mature-node chips, a segment in which China holds a large share of global output. Few would dare claim that the vehicles on Taiwan's streets, including those entering public buildings and military bases, are free of Chinese chips.
Target Real Risks, Not Every Component
National security matters and must be protected, but it is best protected with professional, pragmatic judgment. Components that pose genuine risks, such as data leakage or remote control through malicious code, should be identified and kept out. Those that carry no such risk should not be swept up in blanket bans, which serve no purpose and create fresh controversy.
Elevating a procurement breach or a forgery case into a national security prosecution, or applying national security penalties to tech employees who leak corporate secrets, is not merely overkill. It is an abuse of the law meant to protect the nation.
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