by Brian Hioe

語言:
English
Photo Credit: Charlie Qi/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0

NEWS BROKE TODAY that the Chinese government approved the arrest of Taiwanese independence activist Yang Chih-yuan (楊智淵) today, based on reporting by Chinese media. Yang was arrested on charges of secession and is thought to be held in Wenzhou, Zhejiang.

The Beijing Daily reported today that the Supreme People’s Procuratorate had approved Yang’s arrest following an investigation by the National Security Bureau of Wenzhou, Zhejiang. Yang is currently held under Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location, a form of detention used in China by which the state holds prisoners in special facilities often referred to as “training centers”, though these may be former hotels converted into prisons, and is not required to notify families of arrests.

Yang, who was born in 1990 and is 32, serves as deputy chair of the pro-independence Taiwanese National Party (TNP). As such, Yang is known to be supportive of Taiwanese independence. Nonetheless, the TNP is not very well-known, even among pro-independence groups or political parties.

Yang previously had a history of pan-Green activism, including having previously been a member of Chen Shui-bian’s abortive pro-independence Taiwan Action Party Alliance, which dissolved in 2020, and the DPP. Yang, likewise, was a participant in the 2008 Wild Strawberry Movement and 2013 protests against Taiwanese Ma Ying-jeou.

Photo of Yang being detained by police. CCTV screenshot

Yang originally disappeared in January 2022 after traveling to China. It is not clear why Yang thought it safe to travel to China, though the obscurity of the TNP may have contributed to his view that it would be safe for him to travel to China. But, quite unusually, Yang was also friendly with members of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), which has been accused of ties to pro-unification organized crime groups such as the Bamboo Union triad. Yang was even solicited by the CUPP as a political candidate.

Although his whereabouts were unknown after his disappearance, it became known that he had been imprisoned by the Chinese government in August 2022 when he appeared on Chinese state-run media while in detention. This was in the same timeframe as then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s historic visit to Taiwan and China’s live-fire drills in response to the visit. According to the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) at the time, Yang’s family had not reported his disappearance to them. The MAC issued a travel advisory for China after Yang’s imprisonment became known. Some reports by Chinese state-run media claim that Yang was taken into custody in August.

News of Yang’s imprisonment may have been released with the aim of intimidating Taiwan, even if he may have been arrested earlier. However, there was not much attention on his detention at that point in time, likely because such news was overshadowed by the other events that took place around the time of the Pelosi visit.

Greater attention on Yang’s arrest this time may be because Chinese media reporting on it takes place in a similar timeframe to news that the Chinese government is detaining Li Yanhe (李延賀), the editor-in-chief of Gusa Publishing (八旗文化), in Shanghai. Li is a Chinese national residing in Taiwan who is married to a Taiwanese woman and his Gusa Publishing frequently publishes works critical of the Chinese government.

However, more broadly, Yang’s imprisonment gestures toward how Chinese arrests of Taiwanese citizens or residents of Taiwan sometimes is not known until later on. Sometimes this is because family members of the arrested individual believe that they would be released more quickly if they keep quiet and do not publicly advocate for their release. This was what occurred with Li’s detention, which took place last month, but was not known until this was publicized by exiled Chinese dissident poet Bei Ling. Bei stated that news had not broken about Li’s detention because the family had kept quiet on the matter, though he believed that open advocacy would be more effective in securing Lee’s release.

Tweet by Bei Ling on Li Yanhe’s detention

Previously, Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Taiwanese human rights NGO worker Lee Ming-che, who was imprisoned by China for five years, faced intimidation from individuals claiming to act as intermediaries for the Chinese government. Such individuals called on her to drop open advocacy for her husband’s release, suggesting that he would be released earlier if she did so. Lee refused to comply with such threats.

But there are, in fact, a number of Taiwanese currently held in China on political charges that receive comparatively little media exposure. Businessman Morrison Lee Meng-chu was detained by Chinese authorities after entering China, following participation in protests in Hong Kong in 2019. Lee is thought to have been released from detention, but blocked from returning to Taiwan as of last year.

Members of the pan-Blue camp have also been held by the Chinese government. Examples include pro-unification academic Tsai Chin-shu, whose disappearance only came to light in 2019 after more than 420 days in detention because his family, too, sought to keep quiet about the matter. Otherwise, pan-Blue academic Shih Cheng-ping was sentenced in 2020 to espionage charges, thought to be over an article he wrote for the China Times, and this was not reported on initially because his family had also kept quiet.

It is unclear how many Taiwanese are currently held by the Chinese government on political charges, then. In 2019, the MAC stated that there were 149 Taiwanese citizens missing in China, with the MAC unable to confirm the whereabouts of 67 individuals. It is unclear how this number may have changed since then, as well as how accurate this is when some families are reluctant to go public about arrests.

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