A Chinese dissident, angry that Taiwan has not granted him permanent asylum, yesterday asked the government to send him back to China.
Cai Lujun (蔡陸軍), 40, said he made the request because he could no longer endure the “endless wait” for asylum and the humiliation of living like a “half ghost, half human being.”
He said he is not afraid of imprisonment in China for defecting to Taiwan, because it would be better being jailed in China than begging for food and waiting indefinitely for asylum in Taiwan.
In a statement entitled “The Taiwan and US Governments, Please Remember: I am a Human Being!” Cai also blasted the US for rejecting his asylum application, calling it a coward before China.
Cai applied for asylum in the US with the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) on Sept. 11.
The AIT turned him down on the grounds that Taiwan has a well-established mechanism to protect asylum seekers.
Cai, a former businessman in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, China, was jailed for three years in 2003 for criticizing China’s government on the Internet.
On July 26 last year he fled to Taiwan on a Taiwan fishing boat to seek asylum.
Cai was kept in a detention center for illegal Chinese job seekers for three months and was released in December, after Taipei confirmed that he was a bona fide defector.
Then began the long wait to be granted asylum.
The Mainland Affairs Council promised to grant asylum to Cai and four other Chinese pro-democracy activists — some of whom have been in Taiwan for four years — or find a third country to accept them.
But the council said it could not grant asylum now as an asylum bill is still pending review in the legislature. Its effort to help them find asylum in a foreign country has been futile because most countries have diplomatic ties with China and do not want to offend Beijing by sheltering Chinese dissidents.
Cai lives on a NT$10,000 monthly subsidy and cannot work, receive public healthcare or apply for a cellphone because he does not have permanent residence.
After holding several news conferences and a half-day hunger strike in front of the Presidential Office, Cai said he had lost faith in the Taiwanese government and wanted to go home, even if he faces jail in China.
“After one year’s painful experience in Taiwan, I now want to return to China. China is a scoundrel and it admits it is a scoundrel. Taiwan is more shameless than China because it claims to be a nation of freedom and democracy but does not respect human rights,” he said by telephone.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods