Lee Ching-yu (李凈瑜), the wife of detained human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲), said remarks by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) substantiated an accusation that Beijing has its compradors in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), after the office yesterday confirmed that it had commissioned a third party to “relate the relevant situation” to Lee Ching-yu and pass letters from Lee Ming-che to her and his parents, while warning other groups not to intervene in the case.
Outside intervention would complicate matters and harm already tense relations between Taipei and Beijing, the office said.
TAO spokesman An Fengshan (安峰山) said that China had passed letters from Lee Ming-che, who is under investigation for endangering China’s national security, to his wife and parents.
Photo: CNA
On Monday, Lee’s wife was prevented from flying to Beijing to seek a meeting with her husband when China canceled her travel permit.
An told reporters at a news conference in Beijing that authorities were protecting the legal rights of Lee Ming-che, who was taken into custody on March 19, but added that he had no other information about the case.
However, An said outside interference would “only render the issue even more complicated and harm the interests of the person concerned.”
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
“A few Taiwanese people and groups with ulterior motives who are seizing this opportunity to attack the mainland are doomed to failure. They will not achieve their goal of interfering in the work of the relevant mainland departments in handling the case by law,” An said.
An also warned against “attempts by the Taiwanese authorities to use the incident to attack the mainland,” saying that “would only make the already extremely grim cross-strait relationship even worse.”
Lee Ching-yu said in a statement that Lee Chun-min (李俊敏), a third-party broker, had told her that her husband’s arrest was the result of Chinese security services “missing their mark” — arresting the “wrong person” due to pressure to show results in enforcing a law regulating non-governmental organizations.
She quoted him as saying that her husband’s detention was a “bad case,” as cross-strait relations are sensitive, and added that there was tension between Chinese security forces and the TAO over how to proceed.
“This case is the result of Guangdong’s national defense department ‘hitting the gas pedal,’ which is related to conflicts between the [Chinese] Ministry of State Security and the TAO that we have seen in the past,” she quoted him as saying.
“If [Lee Chun-min] has been commissioned by the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, this amounts to an acknowledgement that they have arrested the wrong person,” Lee Ching-yu said. “As they were afraid that the central government in Beijing would find out about the mistake, they sent Lee Chun-min to contain the issue by threatening, intimidating and cajoling me into not going to Beijing to reveal the truth — that is the real reason my travel permit was canceled.”
Lee Chun-min told Lee Ching-yu that he was an assistant to KMT Legislator Lai Shyh-bao (賴士葆), she said, accusing the KMT of selling out the nation as “China’s compradors in Taiwan.”
Lee Ching-yu said her husband has hypertension and she has attempted to have medication sent to him.
Additional reporting by Abraham Gerber
SEPARATE: The MAC rebutted Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is China’s province, asserting that UN Resolution 2758 neither mentions Taiwan nor grants the PRC authority over it The “status quo” of democratic Taiwan and autocratic China not belonging to each other has long been recognized by the international community, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday in its rebuttal of Beijing’s claim that Taiwan can only be represented in the UN as “Taiwan, Province of China.” Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) yesterday at a news conference of the third session at the 14th National People’s Congress said that Taiwan can only be referred to as “Taiwan, Province of China” at the UN. Taiwan is an inseparable part of Chinese territory, which is not only history but
NATIONAL SECURITY: The Chinese influencer shared multiple videos on social media in which she claimed Taiwan is a part of China and supported its annexation Freedom of speech does not allow comments by Chinese residents in Taiwan that compromise national security or social stability, the nation’s top officials said yesterday, after the National Immigration Agency (NIA) revoked the residency permit of a Chinese influencer who published videos advocating China annexing Taiwan by force. Taiwan welcomes all foreigners to settle here and make families so long as they “love the land and people of Taiwan,” Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) told lawmakers during a plenary session at the Legislative Yuan in Taipei. The public power of the government must be asserted when necessary and the Ministry of
CROSSED A LINE: While entertainers working in China have made pro-China statements before, this time it seriously affected the nation’s security and interests, a source said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) late on Saturday night condemned the comments of Taiwanese entertainers who reposted Chinese statements denigrating Taiwan’s sovereignty. The nation’s cross-strait affairs authority issued the statement after several Taiwanese entertainers, including Patty Hou (侯佩岑), Ouyang Nana (歐陽娜娜) and Michelle Chen (陳妍希), on Friday and Saturday shared on their respective Sina Weibo (微博) accounts a post by state broadcaster China Central Television. The post showed an image of a map of Taiwan along with the five stars of the Chinese flag, and the message: “Taiwan is never a country. It never was and never will be.” The post followed remarks
Proposed amendments would forbid the use of all personal electronic devices during school hours in high schools and below, starting from the next school year in August, the Ministry of Education said on Monday. The Regulations on the Use of Mobile Devices at Educational Facilities up to High Schools (高級中等以下學校校園行動載具使用原則) state that mobile devices — defined as mobile phones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches or other wearables — should be turned off at school. The changes would stipulate that use of such devices during class is forbidden, and the devices should be handed to a teacher or the school for safekeeping. The amendments also say
RSS