Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) Vice Chairman Johnnason Liu (
Liu made the remarks at a press conference in reference to a recent case where a Chinese tourist sought political asylum in Taiwan. He said that it was difficult for the Taiwanese government to respond in such a case as the tourist had arrived in Taiwan on a legally obtained tourist visa.
Chinese tourist Jia Jia (
He turned himself in to police late on Tuesday and claimed political asylum.
After questioning Jia and carrying out an investigation, police discovered he was a high-ranking official from a technology association in Shanxi Province and was not a practitioner of Falun Gong as he had claimed.
Jia has been repatriated to China and he is now in detention in Hong Kong.
Liu yesterday said the officials who questioned Jia said that his testimony was uncertain and he seemed irritable when talking about his family.
Liu said that claims for political asylum needed to follow standard procedures and Jia's case was entirely different to those of political dissidents and leaders of democratic movements.
"Jia applied for the trip to Taiwan and obtained a legal permit from the Chinese government so it is difficult for the Taiwanese government to determine if he had suffered from political persecution as he claimed," Liu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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