Chinese authorities are holding a US citizen whom they accused of spying for Taiwan.
A spokeswoman at the US embassy in Beijing said that its state security services detained Xie Chunren (謝春仁), a businessman of Chinese descent from New Jersey, on May 31 in Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province.
Xie was being kept at a guesthouse under house arrest, which Chinese authorities often use to get around limits set on how long suspects can be held before formal charges are brought.
"He is currently under residential surveillance under suspicion of espionage for Taiwan," the US embassy spokeswoman said, adding that the US consulate in Chengdu was notified of Xie's detention on June 2.
US diplomats have been allowed to visit him three times since then.
His son, Xie Yuanyang (謝元楊), denied that his father was a spy. The son told the International Herald Tribune that he believed his father had mistakenly been caught up in an investigation of old acquaintance Wei Dong (魏東), another US citizen arrested by China in 2003 on charges of spying.
Xie Yuanyang told the newspaper that Dong and his father were not on good terms and, besides one encounter in 2000, had not seen each other in more than 10 years.
Xie Chunren's arrest came amid rising fears of infiltration within China's communist leadership and an expansion of Chinese investigations aimed at ferreting out suspected agents for Taiwan.
Two weeks ago, China also formally charged Ching Cheong (
Both Ching's wife and Taiwan's government denied the charges.
Ching was detained when he was in China to collect transcripts of interviews with late Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang (
Zhao opposed China's bloody reaction to the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests. He was stripped of his party position and was put under house arrest from 1989 until his death early this year.
South Korean K-pop girl group Blackpink are to make Kaohsiung the first stop on their Asia tour when they perform at Kaohsiung National Stadium on Oct. 18 and 19, the event organizer said yesterday. The upcoming performances will also make Blackpink the first girl group ever to perform twice at the stadium. It will be the group’s third visit to Taiwan to stage a concert. The last time Blackpink held a concert in the city was in March 2023. Their first concert in Taiwan was on March 3, 2019, at NTSU Arena (Linkou Arena). The group’s 2022-2023 “Born Pink” tour set a
CPBL players, cheerleaders and officials pose at a news conference in Taipei yesterday announcing the upcoming All-Star Game. This year’s CPBL All-Star Weekend is to be held at the Taipei Dome on July 19 and 20.
The Taiwan High Court yesterday upheld a lower court’s decision that ruled in favor of former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) regarding the legitimacy of her doctoral degree. The issue surrounding Tsai’s academic credentials was raised by former political talk show host Dennis Peng (彭文正) in a Facebook post in June 2019, when Tsai was seeking re-election. Peng has repeatedly accused Tsai of never completing her doctoral dissertation to get a doctoral degree in law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 1984. He subsequently filed a declaratory action charging that
The Hualien Branch of the High Court today sentenced the main suspect in the 2021 fatal derailment of the Taroko Express to 12 years and six months in jail in the second trial of the suspect for his role in Taiwan’s deadliest train crash. Lee Yi-hsiang (李義祥), the driver of a crane truck that fell onto the tracks and which the the Taiwan Railways Administration's (TRA) train crashed into in an accident that killed 49 people and injured 200, was sentenced to seven years and 10 months in the first trial by the Hualien District Court in 2022. Hoa Van Hao, a
RSS