The reasons behind the detention of a Taiwanese production firm manager in China last week are still unclear, despite an official request to Beijing seeking information, the Straits Exchange Foundation said yesterday.
Hsu Chia-sen (徐嘉森), a manager at TV production company Hochan Entertainment Co (和展影視公司), which organizes the Taipei TV Festival, was prevented from leaving China as he tried to board a flight for Taipei at the Beijing International Airport on Saturday.
“We have contacted [China’s] Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits for more information on the case,” Straits Exchange Foundation Vice Chairman Ma Shaw-chang (馬紹章) said. “So far, we haven’t received any official explanation yet.”
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) yesterday said that Hsu has asked him for help, and that he would try to see if he can comply when he travels to China today.
Media outlets in Taiwan — including the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) — have speculated that the Chinese government detained Hsu to seek his assistance in a corruption investigation, or that it was unhappy with his company for allowing the New Tang Dynasty TV (NTDTV) channel to register as a participant in the Taipei TV Festival last year.
The NTDTV is a satellite TV station affiliated with the Falun Gong, the presence of which Beijing prohibits as it considers the movement a “religion of evil.”
Last year, NTDTV’s participation in the event led to the withdrawal of nearly 100 participants from Hong Kong and China, but the festival’s organizers still accepted the channel for this year’s event.
NTDTV said in a statement that it is looking into the case, adding that if Hsu is detained because of the Taipei TV Festival’s acceptance of its request to participate, then “we would like to call on the Taiwanese government to intervene, and would like to urge all those who are concerned about Taiwan to pass on this information to stop China’s repression of freedom of the press, and to defend freedom and democracy in Taiwan.”
The other theory behind Hsu’s detention was proposed by the United Daily News: That the manager was detained to assist Beijing in an investigation it is conducting into a corruption involving TV stations in China.
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