Taiwan businessmen held on spying charges

Two Taiwan businessmen have been arrested on charges of spying in China for the island, a government spokesman said Wednesday, confirming earlier reports in the Taiwan media. The island's United Daily News said last week that two men had been arrested in Southern China for providing military secrets to Taiwan, Reuters reported. Li Weiyi of China's Taiwan Affairs Office said the men's families have been informed by the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait, which handles Taiwan affairs in the absence of official ties. Although economic ties between China and Taiwan have been growing since the late 1980s, it is accepted that both sides have been spying on one another since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. In 1999, a Chinese major-general and a senior colonel were executed for selling state secrets to Taiwan for US$1.6 million.