Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 何炬辉/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
TAIWANESE PRO-UNIFICATION ACADEMIC Tsai Jin-shu, who has been detained in China on spying charges since 2018, is reportedly still unable to return to Taiwan.
Tsai was sentenced to four years in jail. However, rumors suggest that he may currently be under house arrest in Xiamen and is still unable to return to Taiwan, even after the end of his jail sentence.
When questioned on the matter by Taiwanese journalists during a press briefing last week, spokespersons for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) stated that Tsai had been stripped of his political rights, in addition to his four-year jail sentence. As such, the TAO stated that Tsai’s punishment would be carried out according to normal procedures.
A Liberty Times article from June suggests that Tsai faced an additional four years in prison. This claim was repeated by a Taiwan News article on the subject. Nevertheless, the TAO’s comments yesterday do not make clear whether Tsai faces additional jail time. Taiwanese authorities have stated that they are in contact with Tsai and his family.
Tsai Jing-shu posing for a photo. Photo credit: Tsai Jing-shu/Facebook
Either way, the Taiwan News article contains some basic factual errors. For example, the article brings up that Tsai is among several pro-unification academics who are currently detained in China on spying charges, but also lists Morrison Lee Meng-chu among this list.
Morrison Lee Meng-chu was arrested after entering China after participating in pro-democracy protests that broke out in Hong Kong in 2019, of which he had photos on his phone at the time he crossed the border. Lee also took photos of Chinese military vehicles in Shenzhen at a time when it was rumored that China could potentially react with military force to forcibly put down the Hong Kong protests. This does not suggest pro-unification views. Likewise, Lee is a businessman, and not an academic.
Nevertheless, like Lee, Tsai was arrested at a time when China was seeking to bolster political claims that Taiwanese spies were involved in fomenting the Hong Kong protests. To this extent, Morrison Lee was also not initially allowed to return to China after being released.
Lee was released by detention in 2021 but only allowed to return earlier this year. It is thought that this partly had to do with Lee also being deprived of his political rights for two years, in addition to his jail sentence. While foreigners are usually deported from China after jail sentences, seeing as they do not have rights to political participation in China, the situation is less clear with those from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.
It is possible that Tsai being deprived of his political rights for four years amounts to a de facto four years in which he will not be allowed to return to Taiwan. After all, it took around two years for Lee to be allowed to return to Taiwan, though he was warned to keep a low profile and so initially traveled to Japan. Since his release, Lee has spoken out about his treatment, as well as expressing his relief to be allowed to return to Taiwan.
Overall, it remains murky as to how many Taiwanese are detained by China on political charges. Tsai’s case proves one example, in that it was originally not known that he was imprisoned in China until more than a year later. Tsai’s detention only came to light earlier in September 2019 after Shih Chien University professor Chiang Min-chin, a member of the KMT, disclosed information about Tsai’s detention on Jaw Shaw-kong’s TVBS political talk show, “‘Shaw-kong’s War Room.”
This information previously was not known because Tsai’s family hoped to keep quiet on the matter. This is sometimes the case, in that families sometimes believe that their relatives will be released more quickly if they do not publicize their arrests. The Taiwanese government usually complies with the wishes of family members if they do not wish to go public about the arrests of their relatives, though there are also cases in which the Taiwanese government is unaware of the detention of Taiwanese in China because they are not informed by family members.
Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen. Photo credit: Tsai Ing-wen/Facebook
Furthermore, one notes that pan-Blue stances do not prevent arrest by Chinese authorities on spying charges. Tsai was, after all, a member of the KMT and an active advocate of political unification between Taiwan and China. Tsai held a Ph. D from Xiamen University’s Graduate Institute for Taiwan Studies, one of China’s major research centers about Taiwan, and chaired the Southern Taiwan Union of Cross-strait Relations Associations, as well as served as director of the Kaohsiung Cross-Strait Exchanges Research Association. The Southern Taiwan Union of Cross-strait Relations Associations advocates closer political and economic relations between Taiwan and China and supported the Ma administration’s efforts at establishing closer ties with China, as observed in the organization’s support of the 2015 Ma-Xi meeting. The arrest in China of academic Shih Cheng-pin, who was also a member of the KMT and sentenced to four years in jail in 2020, proves similar.
It is possible that China’s scattershot targeting of Taiwanese that are, in fact, from the pan-Blue camp serves to further push Taiwan away from China. But, in the meantime, many important questions remain to be raised about the Taiwanese who are detained in China.
Indeed, it was reported yesterday by the Liberty Times that a Chinese spouse with ROC nationality who is married to a Taiwanese person has been detained by the Chinese government after returning to China to visit relatives. Details about this case are still scarce, though it is suspected that this person may have been detained over their membership in a support group for Tsai Ing-wen, the “Friends of Xiao-ying Association”.
Either way, the detention of the Chinese spouse of a Taiwanese person who has ROC nationality proves similar to that of publisher Fucha, who has been held in China since April. Fucha was involved in the publishing of books about political matters, as the editor-in-chief of Gusa Publishing, and was reportedly traveling to China to give up his Chinese citizenship when he was detained.
It is to be seen whether this case will be deemed a national security case by relevant Taiwanese authorities. Relevant Taiwanese authorities state that they have not yet received a request for aid for this individual. Such reports occur at a time that the Taiwanese government officials has warned of China questioning and interrogating Taiwanese entering and exiting China, however.