Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Puma Shen/Facebook
CHINESE STATE-RUN MEDIA has sought to frame DPP legislator Puma Shen as under investigation by government authorities. This proves unusual, seeing as China does not control Taiwan, and there would be little way for China to enforce any judicial rulings against Shen.
Still, Chinese state-run media has also begun to lean into the narrative that it may seek to arrest Shen through Interpol. The framing is that Shen is an international criminal and that China would be within its rights to use Interpol to arrest him.
This has not prevented a trip to Berlin to speak at a hearing by a Berlin parliamentary committee earlier this week. Shen stressed during his comments that he was not afraid of Chinese threats.
Shen is probably a target of particular ire for China, given Shen’s reputation for being tough on China. Shen is one of the co-founders of the Doublethink Labs, Taiwan’s best-known disinformation research organization, as well as of the Kuma Academy, Taiwan’s best-known civil defense organization.
Apart from sanctioning Shen several times, the Chinese government has also sanctioned Shen’s father, whose company does business in China. Through this, the Chinese government hoped to depict Shen as hypocritical and a war profiteer, in that the Kuma Academy seeks to build up civil defense efforts against a hypothetical Chinese invasion, but his father does business in China.
Needless to say, this would be the latest move by the Chinese government that seeks to use international institutions such as Interpol to target enemies of the Chinese state. Furthermore, China has often tried to depict its actions as on the basis of an internationally recognized consensus that Taiwan is violating.
Indeed, this is how China has framed its One China Principle, which is not the same as the One China Policy that many countries around the world have, and trying to attack shows of support for Taiwan as violating the One China Principle. The attempt is to mislead, in that each country has a different One China Policy, rather than being a unitary One China Policy or One China Principle that the world has agreed to. China has often cited UN Resolution 2758 as a supposed international agreement that the world adheres to, which countries violate by showing support for Taiwan.
It may be that China is escalating threats toward Taiwan in this sense. Vice President Hsiao Bikhim recently traveled to Europe to give a speech in Brussels at the European Parliament. The speech was held at the annual summit of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China. Hsiao’s speech has been touted as a diplomatic breakthrough for Taiwan, in that this is the first time that a Taiwanese vice president has visited the European Parliament, representing a new high for Taiwan-Europe ties. Since then, Chinese disinformation efforts have sought to frame Taiwan as having bribed its way for Hsiao’s speech to occur.
Reports indicate, however, that Hsiao was only informed shortly before she set out to Europe that she would be giving a speech at the European Parliament. Hsiao was previously told that the speech would be delivered via video message.
Details in planning Hsiao’s trip to Europe were classified and carried out with little publicity until Hsiao was already at the European Parliament. Most likely, this was due to caution over a previous incident from earlier this year in which a Chinese military attache planned to ram a vehicle into Hsiao’s motorcade during a June trip by the vice president to Prague.
The planned ramming has been construed as a threat or even a possible assassination attempt. Notably, at the same time as this incident, the KMT was attempting to amend laws in Taiwan that would require a new set of elections to take place if the vice president died.
It may be that Chinese threats against Taiwanese abroad, including–or especially–lawmakers, are at a new high. Shen has himself reported past incidents in which individuals, apparently acting on China’s behest, sought to impersonate him to gain access to international events that he was attending.