by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Bei Ling/Twitter

NEWS BROKE OVER the weekend that Li Yanhe (李延賀), the editor-in-chief of Gusa Publishing (八旗文化), had been detained in China. Li is a Chinese national, but is married to a Taiwanese person, and has resided in Taiwan since 2009. It is thought that Li is currently held under conditions resembling house arrest.

Li is better known as Fucha. Gusa Publishing publishes a number of books critical of the Chinese government. This includes books detailing the Chinese government’s attempts to expand influence through media, such as He Qingilian’s Red Infiltration: The Reality of China’s Global Media Expansion. Other publications include translations, as in publishing the Chinese language translation of Louisa Lim’s People’s Republic of Amnesia.

The news came to light after a Facebook post by Chinese poet and writer Bei Ling, who himself has faced detention over his political views in the past. Bei had himself faced detention in 2000 over his poems and the literary journal he ran, Tendency, and has been living abroad in exile for the past decades.

Facebook post by Gusa Publishing on the detention

Bei stated that Li had been missing since visiting Shanghai in March and urged attention to the case, asserting that the more focus there was on the case, the higher the odds of Li being released. Significantly, Bei stated that the reason why news had not broken earlier about the case was that Li’s family was keeping quiet on the matter.

Bei later deleted his Facebook post, stating that he would be doing so in response to the wishes of Li’s family. Gusa Publishing later issued a statement, calling for the family to be given space. The statement cited that the Mainland Affairs Council, too, had been questioned about the disappearance but declined to provide further details to respect the wishes of Li’s family.

An open letter about Li’s detention has since been issued by intellectuals including Prospect Foundation president Lai I-chung, Soochow University professor Chen Fang-yu, Louisa Lim, Larry Diamond, and others.

Some have compared Li’s detention to the kidnapping of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay booksellers, given Li’s work in the publishing industry. Five workers of Causeway Bay Books, which published books critical of the Chinese government, disappeared in late 2015. Subsequently, they reappeared in China, where they confessed to lurid crimes in extractions that were thought to be forced. At present, only one of the five booksellers, Lam Wing-kee, remains free after having taken the opportunity to escape when allowed to return to Hong Kong to retrieve materials. Lam later moved to Taiwan.

However, the disappearance is also similar to the arrest of Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che. Lee, an NGO worker, was arrested by China in 2017 and held for over five years on charges of “seeking to subvert the state” after entering China from Macau. It is thought that Lee was arrested for discussing the experiences of Taiwan’s democratization with Chinese friends online. Similarly, Taiwanese businessman Morrison Lee Meng-chu was detained in China in 2019 after entering Shenzhen from Hong Kong after participating in the protests there. It is thought that photos of the protests on his phone were a contributing factor to his arrest. Otherwise, while both Lees had pro-democracy politics, there have also been cases in which Taiwanese citizens were arrested by China despite pro-unification views.

Tweet by Bei Ling on Li’s detention

In particular, apart from that these arrests took place after visits to China, a number of the arrests of Taiwanese citizens in China in past years only came to light after the fact because members of their families initially attempted to keep quiet. For example, the arrest of Taiwanese pro-unification academic Tsai Chin-shu originally first came to light because Shih Chien University professor Chiang Min-chin revealed that this had taken place on pan-Blue media figure Jaw Shaw-kong’s talk show. In the case of Lee Ming-che’s arrest, Lee’s mother called on her son to apologize to the Chinese government, while his wife Lee Ching-yu continued on with open advocacy for his release in spite of threats from individuals claiming to intercede on behalf of the Chinese government that her husband would be released faster if she ceased her advocacy.

Consequently, the dynamic in which disagreements break out between friends and family about whether there should be open public campaigns for the release of individuals detained by the Chinese government is not new or exclusive to Li’s detention. It is to be seen whether public pressure can contribute to his release, with the detention having already been widely covered by media–or whether Chinese authorities will decide to take a hard line on the detention in response.
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