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.
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.”
“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
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