August 9 – August 15
Highlights: China's Supreme People’s Court issues its first judicial interpretation of the Ecological Environment Code that takes effect this week; Hong Kong's Court of Appeal allows eleven jailed pro-democracy figures to appeal their national security convictions to the city's top court; Japan revises its seed law to halt unauthorized exports of prized crop varieties; South Korea’s election commission rejects all opposition petitions seeking to overturn the results of June local elections; Taiwan's opposition-controlled legislature passes the central government budget after a record 350-day delay, including controversial funding to develop a domestic defense drone industry; Taiwan's Constitutional Court, reduced to five participating justices by the legislature's blockade of judicial nominees, strikes down rules that had barred prosecutions for child sexual abuse.
China
The Supreme People's Court issued the first judicial interpretation on applying China's new Ecological Environment Code (生态环境法典). Both the interpretation and the code, which the National People’s Congress adopted in March, take effect August 15. The interpretation allows courts to apply the code to earlier conduct when it is more favorable to the offender. Courts also may reduce penalties for violators that voluntarily repair environmental damage or promptly pay compensation.
Caixin published an in-depth report about an organized fraud scheme run through Zhilian, a dating app whose paid chat operators posed as single women living near male users. The operators induced the men, many of them middle-aged or older, to buy virtual gifts by promising to exchange contact information or meet in person. Prosecutors said the scheme took in more than 34 million yuan (US$5 million) from more than 7,000 victims. A district court in the eastern city of Shaoxing convicted more than 100 defendants of fraud and sentenced four principal organizers to seven to twelve years in prison.
A court in Hubei Province sentenced Long Xiang, a former anti-corruption chief in the eastern city of Nanjing, to death with a two-year reprieve for bribery, embezzlement, insider trading, and other crimes. Such sentences are typically commuted to life in prison. The court found that Long accepted more than 261 million yuan (US$38.7 million) in bribes between 2009 and 2025. While leading Nanjing's anti-corruption body from 2009 to 2016, he also shielded individuals from investigation. Caixin reports that Long is the thirty-second official managed directly by the Communist Party's central leadership to be sentenced this year.
Disciplinary authorities in the southwestern city of Chengdu expelled Wang Zexuan, former president of a district court in the city, from the Communist Party and dismissed him from public office. Investigators found that Wang had illegally registered to practice law while serving as a judge. China's Judges Law and Lawyers Law bar active judges from practicing as lawyers. Investigators also accused him of taking bribes and embezzling public property. Authorities transferred his case to prosecutors for criminal indictment.
Caixin examined a national standard, in force since 2013, that requires motorcycles to be scrapped after thirteen years regardless of their condition. The rule dates from an era when motorcycles served mainly as rural cargo haulers. Annual sales of large recreational motorcycles rose from about 13,000 in 2013 to more than 950,000 in 2025. Manufacturers and riders argue that motorcycles should be judged by their condition rather than their age.
The US Federal Communications Commission proposed banning the import and sale of drones made by Anzu Robotics, a Texas-based drone maker. The commission said Anzu's products are manufactured in Malaysia under a licensing arrangement with a restricted company widely understood to be the Chinese drone maker DJI. Reuters reported that the commission has barred new models of Chinese drones, routers, and other devices over the past nine months. In early August, China responded by tightening export controls on US-bound drones and sanctioning a US testing firm.
Hong Kong & Macao
The Court of Appeal granted eleven jailed pro-democracy figures in the “Hong Kong 47” national security case permission to appeal to the Court of Final Appeal, the city's top court. The eleven are among forty-five persons convicted in 2024 of conspiracy to commit subversion for participating in an unofficial primary election in 2020. The judges certified five questions of “great and general importance,” including the meaning of “unlawful means” in the National Security Law.
Secretary for Security Chris Tang said that more than 90 percent of about 6,000 public submissions supported the government’s proposed overhaul of the city’s colonial-era sexual offense laws. The draft revisions would create dozens of new offenses, expand the definition of rape, and redefine consent. Tang pledged to submit a bill to the Legislative Council within the year.
The Hong Kong Bar Association, the professional regulator of barristers, applied for judicial review of a disciplinary tribunal ruling that cleared Margaret Ng, a barrister and former pro-democracy lawmaker, of professional misconduct. The complaint arose from Ng's 2021 conviction for taking part in an unauthorized assembly during the 2019 protests. The association argues that the conviction itself should have established misconduct.
A magistrate acquitted a woman of possessing an offensive weapon and possessing items with intent to damage property during the 2019 protests. Police arrested Ami Chan, then 15, found to be carrying spray paint and two laser pointers, but she was not prosecuted at the time. She was charged this year, at age 21, when she returned to Hong Kong from Australia. Magistrate Edward Wong said the day's demonstrations took place in other districts and Chan “was just walking on the street.”
A magistrate sentenced a 19-year-old man to an eighteen-month probation order for writing seditious messages in the bathroom of a commercial building. According to the newspaper Ming Pao, it is the first non-custodial sentence under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance, the security law Hong Kong enacted in 2024. Leung Kai-lok's messages included a call to bomb Chief Executive John Lee and a 2019 protest slogan that courts have ruled seditious. Magistrate Victor So said the messages had limited influence because Leung wrote them in a bathroom.
The family of a jailed former pro-democracy lawmaker in Macao, Au Kam San, said they learned he had a preliminary hearing on July 2 and that a court upheld his indictment on charges of subverting state power, breach of confidentiality and establishing contact with organizations, groups or people outside Macao to commit acts endangering national security. Au was arrested in July 2025 and has been held incommunicado since. No date has been set for his trial.
Japan
The Diet revised the Plant Variety Protection and Seed Act (種苗法) in July to stem the unauthorized export of domestically developed crop varieties. The revision allows breeders to seek injunctions against unauthorized exports during the three-to-six-year screening period for plant breeders' intellectual property rights in new plant varieties. It also extends the rights by ten years, to forty years for fruit trees and thirty-five years for other crops. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries estimates that unauthorized overseas cultivation of the Shine Muscat grape alone costs its developers almost ¥20 billion (US$123 million) annually in royalties.
A controversial new law that punishes publicly damaging or defacing the national flag took effect August 13. Opponents say the law's standard of causing people to feel “extremely uncomfortable or disgusted” is too vague and could restrict artistic and political expression.
The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare decided not to tighten restrictions on heated tobacco products in its five-year review of the country's secondhand smoke rules. Unlike e-cigarettes, which vaporize a nicotine liquid, heated tobacco products, including IQOS, heat sticks of real tobacco without burning them. The Health Promotion Act (健康増進法) generally bans indoor smoking at restaurants and other public facilities. However, it permits heated tobacco use in designated rooms where patrons may continue to eat and drink. The ministry concluded that current evidence does not establish the health effects of secondhand exposure to heated tobacco.
The South Korean Supreme Court upheld an order requiring Nippon Steel Corp. to pay 80 million won (about US$56,000) in damages to the family of a Korean man forced to work at one of its steel plants during World War II. It was the second final judgment against the company in a series of lawsuits filed after the court first ordered a Japanese company to compensate wartime laborers in 2018. A South Korean government-affiliated foundation created in 2023 to pay such judgments on behalf of Japanese companies reportedly lacks sufficient funds.
Koreas
The National Election Commission, which administers South Korean elections, rejected or dismissed all 261 petitions filed by the opposition People Power Party seeking to invalidate the results of June 3 local elections, including the Seoul and Busan mayoral races. The commission found that ballot shortages and voting suspensions violated election regulations but did not affect the outcomes. Fifty polling stations nationwide ran out of ballots on election day. The party plans to file lawsuits seeking to overturn the results.
Police and prosecutors investigating why the ballot shortages occurred said they conducted new raids of commission offices in search of evidence of bid-rigging, misuse of funds, and other alleged wrongdoing.
The South Korean Supreme Court overturned the aggravated intimidation conviction of a woman who brandished a knife at an uncle who was assaulting her. The uncle went to her home and began punching her after she told family members that he had sexually abused her as a child. The court ruled that the woman acted to in self-defense and that her conduct was justifiable under Article 20 of the Criminal Act. The provision exempts from punishment acts that conform to law or other social norms. It sent the case back to a lower court.
A special counsel team indicted former President Yoon Suk Yeol on charges of abuse of power for ordering the presidential National Security Office and the Foreign Ministry to send messages justifying his December 2024 martial law declaration to the United States and other partner governments. The team also indicted Shin Won-sik, Yoon's national security adviser at the time, on charges of playing a key role in an insurrection and abuse of power. Yoon now faces eight trials arising from the martial law declaration, his wife's alleged corruption, and other alleged offenses.
A senior US Federal Bureau of Investigation official disclosed that the bureau had identified a North Korean information technology worker employed remotely by a US federal agency. The official did not name the agency or say whether the worker accessed sensitive information. North Korea is known to place IT workers in overseas jobs under false identities to earn money for the regime and, in some cases, gain access to sensitive systems.
The Seoul High Court upheld the eighteen-month prison sentence of a former employee of South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix for leaking semiconductor technology to a Chinese firm, the Yonhap news agency reported. The man copied internal documents on CMOS image sensors, chips used in smartphone and laptop cameras, while working at the company's office in China. He disclosed some of the information in a resume he submitted to the firm in 2022. He admitted the charges.
Taiwan
The Legislative Yuan passed the fiscal 2026 central government budget, setting a record for delayed enactment of the annual government budget. The opposition parties that control the legislature - the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) - blocked the budget for nearly a year because, among other reasons, the budget proposed by the Cabinet did not include military pay raises and police pension increases that the legislature had mandated by law. Lawmakers cut NT$48 billion (US$1.5 billion), about 1.7 percent of proposed spending, from agency travel, discretionary allowance, and publicity budgets.
The budget included NT$44.2 billion (US$1.37 billion) to support development of a domestic defense drone industry through 2030. The KMT had argued against the provision but came under pressure from US officials and legislators to approve it.
The Legislative Yuan approved three referendum proposals: introducing caning as a criminal punishment for sexual assault, child abuse, and serious fraud; abolishing the government's policy of phasing out nuclear power; and dedicating the revenue from traffic fines to road safety. A fourth proposal, to legalize euthanasia, failed. The KMT and TPP aim to hold the referendums alongside the November 28 local elections, when higher turnout would help clear the threshold for passage: "yes" votes from at least 25 percent of all eligible voters. The outcome of a referendum does not directly change the law; the Cabinet must respond by proposing implementing legislation.
The Constitutional Court ruled that past statute of limitations rules in the Criminal Code were unconstitutional as applied to child victims of sexual offenses because such victims often cannot come forward within the period allowed. The court vacated final decisions in thirteen time-barred cases and returned them to the lower courts. The courts must now apply a July amendment to the Criminal Code that excludes the time before a victim turns twenty from the limitation period for sexual offenses. The court also urged the government to extend the rule to crimes involving sexual images of children, which the amendment omits.
Only five of the court's eight sitting justices took part in the judgment. The opposition-controlled legislature has rejected nominees to fill the fifteen-member court's seven vacancies. Three of the sitting justices have refused to join deliberations on the ground that a 2024 law requires at least ten justices to hear a case.
The Taipei District Prosecutors Office indicted lawyer Chen Chen-wei (陳振偉) and several associates on charges of violating the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area by fabricating business documents to obtain Taiwan entry permits for four Chinese nationals. Three of the four entered Taiwan to apply for passports at the embassy of Belize, which recognizes Taiwan rather than Beijing. Citing national security risks, prosecutors recommended a heavy sentence for Chen.
The New Taipei District Court sentenced Xu Chunying (徐春鶯), a Chinese-born woman who naturalized in Taiwan through marriage and led an organization of Chinese-born spouses, to seven years in prison for violating the Anti-Infiltration Act and for financial crimes. The court found that Xu, acting on instructions from two Chinese officials, campaigned for the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) candidate in Taipei's 2022 mayoral election and for TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in 2024. Xu was also convicted of fraudulently arranging a Taiwan visit for one of the officials, illegal foreign exchange operations, and loan fraud. (See related item above.) The TPP said the court’s finding that Xu campaigned for Ko on Beijing's orders was a politically motivated attempt to smear the TPP as pro-Beijing.
The Executive Yuan, Taiwan's cabinet, approved draft amendments to the Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法) to prevent the use of cryptocurrency and stablecoins for money laundering. The amendments would make providing virtual asset or payment services without registration, and issuing stablecoins without authorization, crimes that can give rise to money laundering charges. The bill now goes to the legislature.