China has incurred the anger of many Taiwanese over its increasingly obstructive behavior as it tries to stop the wife of detained human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲) from finding out his whereabouts and condition.
On Tuesday, the Mainland Affairs Council called an international news conference, criticizing China for refusing to respond to inquiries about Lee Ming-che for 24 days.
Indeed, China has refused to offer the slightest gesture of goodwill and even revoked the “Taiwan compatriot travel document” of Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu (李凈瑜), on Monday to prevent her from flying to Beijing to search for her husband.
If this were not enough, the Chinese media have also cast aspersions on Lee Ching-yu’s behavior, calling the whole thing “one big farce aimed at ignorant Taiwanese independence advocates to incite hatred” against China.
People on both sides of the Taiwan Strait who hold human rights in contempt point out that Lee Ming-che previously worked for the Democratic Progressive Party, and were unified in their criticism of his wife, saying she is no political novice and had once run for legislator.
This type of character assassination is an old trick, an attempt at destroying the reputation of the victim while ignoring what is essentially a case of political kidnapping.
It is apparently all right for Beijing to kidnap somebody, but not for the kidnapped person’s family to seek help to find them. This is a kidnapper’s logic.
To say that this is all a big farce aimed at arousing Taiwanese independence advocates is, frankly, overestimating Lee Ching-yu’s influence, while at the same time underestimating how pernicious they themselves are.
That might have been possible during the period when the government was very anti-communist, with Taiwanese enmity toward China the result of brain-washing under then-presidents Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Cross-strait relations have since improved, but China has remained one of the least favorite countries in Taiwanese eyes because of its persistent attempts to intimidate Taiwan and its ever-tightening grip on its own people.
If nothing else, this enmity is linked to the fact that the minute President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office, Beijing launched a trade and diplomatic war against Taiwan, treated pan-blue city and county-level heads differently and put cooperation on fighting crime on hold — all because Tsai refused to accept any consensus on “one China.”
Beijing has brought all the measures it can to bear to punish the democratically elected leader of Taiwan. Things have come full circle from anti-communist slogans to actual contact, and Beijing has shown itself for the repugnant entity that it is.
Does Taiwan really need any help in finding reasons to feel enmity toward China? One need not look further than the terrible way China has treated Taiwan.
Hijackings such as these are two a penny in China: the charge of “endangering national security” is a trumped-up excuse. Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) has been locked away for his political views, not to mention the many human rights lawyers and grassroots protesters who have fallen foul of the authorities in one way or the other.
One more recent development is the cross-border hijackings, such as the five men associated with Causeway Bay Books in Hong Kong. This escalation in barbarity tells us again that any Taiwanese entering China, or even just going through immigration, is putting themselves in potential danger, and if they are unfortunate enough they could the next victim.
Zhou Hongxu (周泓旭), a Chinese exchange student suspected of espionage, was detained in Taiwan under the National Security Act (國家安全法), and somebody needed to be sacrificed in retaliation, perhaps to be used at some time in the near future as a hostage.
For more than two decades now there have been countless cases of Taiwanese businesspeople in China wrongly accused of crimes. The Chinese Communist Party has not changed.
In the late 1970s, under then leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), China opened up to the rest of the world. In the mid-1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo started “allowing” Taiwanese to travel China to find their relatives or travel.
As Beijing was eager for business and investment, and because people were finally able to get back into contact with relatives they had not seen for so long, the initial experience of thawing cross-strait relations was essentially a positive one. The anti-communist brainwashing of the Chiang Kai-shek era dissipated.
However, when Taiwan held its first direct presidential elections in 1996, China conducted transparently intimidatory missile tests in the waters just off Taiwan, initiated its brazen policy of using economics to secure political unification and embarked on military scare tactics, all in the interests of unification.
Cross-strait relations for the past two decades, despite the superficial peace under former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), have been a back-and-forth between China wanting to annex Taiwan and Taiwan resisting, all beneath a thin facade of a false peace. With Taiwanese business investment speeding up China’s economic growth, the latter now has the wherewithal to exert even more hard and soft power over Taiwan.
Fortunately, Taiwan has become a democracy, and these changes have only further united Taiwanese against their common enemy and forged an identification with Taiwan superseding nationalistic loyalties. Thus were the green shoots of the generation of natural independence cultivated into a mainstream force.
Beijing has never really understood why, even when it has — in its own eyes — offered so many concessions, Taiwan has never really been grateful.
If Ma’s pro-China policies benefited anyone, it was only a minority of cross-strait politicians and corporations, while the vast majority of people have suffered the side-effects of economic overreliance on China.
Employment has fallen, incomes have decreased and people are marrying later and having fewer children. Chinese officials and tourists coming to Taiwan swagger around and abuse Taiwanes symbols of identity and, at international events, Taiwan is made to feel small by being forced to call itself “Chinese Taipei.”
The result is Taiwanese have developed an overwhelmingly negative image of China. Pro-unification factions in Taiwan are all words and little action.
Beijing insists that pro-independence sympathies are shared by a tiny minority of Taiwanese, but if this were true, if they were really such a tiny minority, would they be able to whip up such hatred toward China?
Every time China points missiles at Taiwan, every time a Lee Ming-che disappears and is forced into giving a confession, China is pushing Taiwan further away.
If it continues along this path, it is going to have to face up to the reality of the implications of what it has done.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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