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
The US government has signed defense cooperation agreements with Japan and the Philippines to boost the deterrence capabilities of countries in the first island chain, a report by the National Security Bureau (NSB) showed. The main countries on the first island chain include the two nations and Taiwan. The bureau is to present the report at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The US military has deployed Typhon missile systems to Japan’s Yamaguchi Prefecture and Zambales province in the Philippines during their joint military exercises. It has also installed NMESIS anti-ship systems in Japan’s Okinawa
‘WIN-WIN’: The Philippines, and central and eastern European countries are important potential drone cooperation partners, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung said Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) in an interview published yesterday confirmed that there are joint ventures between Taiwan and Poland in the drone industry. Lin made the remark in an exclusive interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper). The government-backed Taiwan Excellence Drone International Business Opportunities Alliance and the Polish Chamber of Unmanned Systems on Wednesday last week signed a memorandum of understanding in Poland to develop a “non-China” supply chain for drones and work together on key technologies. Asked if Taiwan prioritized Poland among central and eastern European countries in drone collaboration, Lin
Renewed border fighting between Thailand and Cambodia showed no signs of abating yesterday, leaving hundreds of thousands of displaced people in both countries living in strained conditions as more flooded into temporary shelters. Reporters on the Thai side of the border heard sounds of outgoing, indirect fire yesterday. About 400,000 people have been evacuated from affected areas in Thailand and about 700 schools closed while fighting was ongoing in four border provinces, said Thai Rear Admiral Surasant Kongsiri, a spokesman for the military. Cambodia evacuated more than 127,000 villagers and closed hundreds of schools, the Thai Ministry of Defense said. Thailand’s military announced that
CABINET APPROVAL: People seeking assisted reproduction must be assessed to determine whether they would be adequate parents, the planned changes say Proposed amendments to the Assisted Reproduction Act (人工生殖法) advanced yesterday by the Executive Yuan would grant married lesbian couples and single women access to legal assisted reproductive services. The proposed revisions are “based on the fundamental principle of respecting women’s reproductive autonomy,” Cabinet spokesperson Michelle Lee (李慧芝) quoted Vice Premier Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君), who presided over a Cabinet meeting earlier yesterday, as saying at the briefing. The draft amendment would be submitted to the legislature for review. The Ministry of Health and Welfare, which proposed the amendments, said that experts on children’s rights, gender equality, law and medicine attended cross-disciplinary meetings, adding that
RSS