More than a score of Taiwanese will be spending several years in Chinese jails, despite protests from Taipei, after being convicted on Thursday of taking part in a telecom fraud ring in Armenia that targeted Chinese nationals. That is bad news for them and for Taiwan, but not because Beijing was able to convince Armenia to deport 78 Taiwanese, along with 51 Chinese, to China in September 2016, after they were arrested on fraud charges.
The Huadu District People’s Court in Guangzhou, China, convicted 29 of the Taiwanese transferred from Armenia, handing down prison terms ranging from three to 11 years, while the rest have yet to go on trial.
It is bad for Taiwan’s image to be seen as a source of telecom fraudsters and cybercrime, in the way that Nigeria’s name has become almost synonymous with Internet fraud or Russia with social network and media disinformation.
In the past two years, more than 360 Taiwanese who have allegedly been involved in telecom fraud schemes have been extradited to China, including the Armenia group, from as far away as Kenya to as close as Vietnam and Cambodia, joining scores of compatriots extradited on telecom and bank fraud charges years earlier.
China has claimed the right to prosecute not only its own citizens arrested in such cases, but Taiwanese as well, on the grounds that their victims are Chinese nationals, while the deporting nations usually cite the “one China” principle in bowing to Beijing’s extradition demands.
The Philippines began deporting Taiwanese suspects to China as early as 2011, despite strong protests from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the number of nations choosing to cite the “one China” principle and Beijing’s demands has continued to grow.
China has also turned a deaf ear to complaints from the Mainland Affairs Council that its actions are counterproductive to combating cross-border fraud and to furthering cross-strait relations.
For many years, China and other nations were able to argue, and rightly so, that repatriating such suspects to Taiwan meant letting them get off scot-free, because it was almost impossible for prosecutors to indict fraudsters for actions committed overseas. However, in November 2016, the Legislative Yuan amended the Criminal Code to include aggravated fraud on the list of crimes that could be prosecuted in Taiwan, even if it took place “outside the territories of the Republic of China.”
That, along with more aggressive efforts by the Criminal Investigation Bureau to crack down on people in Taiwan suspected of involvement in telecom fraud abroad, has helped. For example, 97 Taiwanese were arrested in January in Croatia and Slovenia after authorities in those nations were tipped off by local officials, with 91 of them repatriated to Taiwan for trial, while raids last month in Taichung led to the arrests of five people suspected of being behind the rings.
Taiwanese engaged in telecom fraud overseas have severely tarnished the nation’s international image, bureau Deputy Director Lu Chun-chang (呂春長) said last month as he announced the raids abroad and in Taichung.
Lu said the police have created a digital platform to track fraud suspects and inform authorities overseas. That is a good start, but the government needs to do more to discourage people from going abroad to take part in telecom fraud rings.
Print and social media campaigns should be aimed at schools and colleges, as well as linked to passport information Web sites, warning that involvement in such schemes could lead to several years in prison — and a Chinese prison at that.
It is not a case of acknowledging Beijing’s “one China” principle, but acknowledging reality. It is no good protesting about deportations to China after people are arrested; the idea should be to convince them not to break the law in the first place.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US