Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Bei Ling/Twitter
REPORTS INDICATE that Taiwan-based Chinese publisher Fucha, who has been held by the Chinese government for over two years without a trial, has been secretly tried by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.
There has been a paucity of details on the case since Fucha was detained during a trip to China in March 2023. Last month, however, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate held a press conference in which the Fucha case and that of Taiwan National Party co-founder Yang Chih-yuan were termed “majorly endangered national security cases.” The verdict is expected to be a heavy one, but it has not been announced, with Fucha facing charges of “inciting secession”. Yang was, on the other hand, sentenced to nine years in jail and two years deprived of civil rights.
Fucha is the pen name of Li Yanhe, who previously served as the editor-in-chief of Gusa Publishing. The name “Gusa” refers to the eight banners used by the Manchu, seeing as Li is of Manchu descent.
While originally a Chinese national from Liaoning, Li acquired Taiwanese nationality through marriage to a Taiwanese person. Li had been residing in Taiwan since 2009. Namely, Gusa Publishing frequently released books critical of the Chinese government. This includes He Qingilian’s Red Infiltration: The Reality of China’s Global Media Expansion and translations, as in the Chinese language edition of Louisa Lim’s People’s Republic of Amnesia.
That Fucha and Yang’s cases were singled out is thought to represent how the two were targeted as a means of politically intimidating Taiwan.
Yang, who was sentenced in September of last year, proves the first case of a Taiwanese national sentenced on charges of separatism. Though the co-founder of the pro-independence Taiwan National Party (TNP), the TNP is an obscure grouping even among other pro-independence groups. Unusually, Yang also had links to pro-unification groups that are linked to organized crime, such as the China Unification Promotion Party.
Photo credit: Charlie Qi/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
Yang had been held since January 2022 after traveling to China to participate in a Go tournament, before his whereabouts became known in August 2022 after he appeared on Chinese state-run media while in detention. Yang’s family had not previously informed the Mainland Affairs Council of his disappearance.
Fucha’s arrest took place after traveling to China in order to give up his Chinese household registration, a requirement for being a Taiwanese national. Taiwanese nationals are forbidden from holding Chinese household registration.
News of Fucha’s sentencing proves ironic at a time in which there is significant concern about the number of Taiwanese who hold Chinese national IDs, including individuals who work as public servants or may be members of the military. Concerns about the possibility of Chinese infiltration have also led the government moving to raise barriers to permanent residency for individuals from Hong Kong and Macau, as well as blocking pathways to citizenship for them–even if this may prevent those seeking to escape the deterioration of political freedoms in Hong Kong from seeking safety in Taiwan.
In a similar timeframe, the government has moved to invalidate the residency of a Chinese influencer living in Taiwan, also married to a Taiwanese national, over her public expressions of support for the military annexation of Taiwan. Even as there is a debate about what constitutes justified freedom of speech in Taiwan over expressions of support for military annexation, there has scarcely been any public discussion of the impact on Chinese asylum seekers of recent debates about immigration.
The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) previously called on the Taipei city government to bring up Fucha’s imprisonment as part of city-based exchanges between Taipei and Shanghai. Fucha’s family, however, requested that the SEF not do this again. Many families do not inform the government that family members have been imprisoned by China out of fear that this will lead to retaliation. This appears to have been true of both Fucha and Li, with Chinese dissident poet Bei Ling being the one to have originally publicized Fucha’s detention. At the time, Bei urged that Fucha was likely to be released sooner if there was more public attention to the case.
Fucha’s fate remains up in the air, then. Given the opacity of the Chinese legal system, it is unclear when there will be further details on the case.