The government will provide assistance to help free people who have been detained in China for unknown reasons as long as the families of the victims agree, the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said yesterday.
The council was responding to a story published by the Chinese-language United Daily News that Deng Zhi-hong (鄧智鴻), a Taiwanese businessman operating in China, has been detained since he was arrested at Xiamen Gaoqi International Airport late last year.
Chinese authorities have not provided any information about Deng’s case and have not granted visitation rights to his family, the report said.
Deng’s family has hired a Chinese lawyer and is seeking assistance from the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and its Chinese counterpart — the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) — to free him, the report said.
The foundation and ARATS are semi-official bodies set up by Taiwan and China to handle issues related to civilian exchanges in the absence of official ties.
The government will provide assistance to any Taiwanese who have encountered an emergency while traveling in China or to those whose personal freedoms have been restricted, the MAC said in a statement.
The government will handle with such cases differently based on their families’ willingness to have Taiwanese authorities get involved and China’s judicial proceedings, the council said.
However, the council did not comment on Deng’s individual case nor did it offer any insight to the type of assistance it could provide.
In March, human rights campaigner Lee Ming-che (李明哲) was detained by China, which two months later said he faced charges of “subverting state power.”
Lee’s ordeal has drawn the attention of domestic and international media.
According to the minutes of an MAC consultative meeting released on Tuesday, some experts said Lee’s case would not be the last of its kind and the government needs to come up with appropriate responses.
Deng, a former worker at the Chinese National Federation of Industries — a Taiwanese business association — was heading an association that provides services to Chinese businesses interested in investing or sourcing materials in Taiwan at the time of his arrest, the newspaper said.
According to SEF statistics, in the past year alone until last month, the foundation has learned of 57 cases of Chinese authorities limiting the freedoms of Taiwanese.
In 2015, under then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), 51 such cases were reported, the SEF said.
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