Visiting Chinese academic Li Yi (李毅) was deported from Taiwan yesterday morning because he was scheduled to make a public speech, which would have breached the terms of his entry permit, the National Immigration Agency (NIA) said.
Li was found at a hostel in Nantou County at 12:35am and was deported on China Airlines Flight 601 from Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport to Hong Kong at 7:25am, the NIA said.
Entering Taiwan under the guise of sightseeing to advocate unifying Taiwan with China by means of force is “worse than terrorism,” Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) told reporters.
Photo: Chu Pei-hsiung, Taipei Times
“Taiwan is a free, democratic and open country. We welcome all to visit Taiwan... However, if you come here to advocate unification through armed invasion under the pretext of sightseeing, you are no different from a terrorist,” Su said.
Li’s deportation was proportionate; he had it coming, Su said, adding that there was no comparison to the treatment of Taiwanese human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲), who was sentenced to five years in a prison in China’s Hunan Province.
Minister of the Interior Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇) said Li should not have planned activities of a political nature or advocated the destruction of Taiwan’s sovereignty.
There are limitations to freedom of speech, Hsu said, adding that statements advocating unification with China by means of force are not welcome in Taiwan.
Li in August last year applied for a multiple-entry permit to visit Taiwan for tourism purposes and arrived in Taiwan on Tuesday, NIA Director-General Chiu Feng-kuang (邱豐光) said yesterday.
Li was asked to leave the country because of his intentions to engage in an activity inconsistent with the purpose of his entry permit, Chiu said.
Shortly before his departure yesterday, Li posted a “departure message” on Chinese social media platform WeChat, saying that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will “eventually be unified.”
After landing in Hong Kong, he said in a radio interview that freedom of speech in Taiwan allows him to discuss topics such as “reunification,” whether by peaceful means or by force.
Li, who has advocated the use of force to unify Taiwan and China, was invited by the Chinese Unity Promotion Party (CUPP) to speak at a forum titled “Cross-Strait Peaceful Unification and Development,” in Taichung today.
In the speech, he was expected to address China’s proposal to implement a “one country, two systems” framework in Taiwan, the CUPP said on Facebook on Thursday.
Given his intentions to engage in activity of a political nature while on a tourist permit, and considering that his pro-unification speech might have jeopardized national security and social stability, Li would be asked to leave Taiwan, the NIA said on Thursday, citing the Regulations Governing the Approval of People of the Mainland Area Visiting Taiwan for Purposes of Tourism (大陸地區人民來台從事觀光活動許可辦法).
Li has been declared persona non grata and would be subject to restrictions if he returns to Taiwan, the Ministry of the Interior said.
Taichung City Councilor Huang Shou-ta (黃守達) of the Democratic Progressive Party said that Li has said that once the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crosses the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese can forget about independence.
Additional reporting by Sean Lin
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS