Academics yesterday criticized China after staff at Taiwan’s representative office in Hong Hong were required to sign a document supporting Beijing’s “one China” principle.
All except one of the eight remaining staff members at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in Hong Kong were forced to return to Taipei on Sunday after they failed to obtain visa extensions.
The Mainland Affairs Council in a statement on Sunday said that China and the Hong Kong government had set “unreasonable political conditions” for visa extension applications by TECO Hong Kong staff, including requiring them to sign a pledge to observe the “one China” policy.
The staff could not sign a document that was “tantamount to acknowledging Bejing’s suzerainty,” Academia Sinica Institute of Sociology fellow Wu Jieh-min (吳介民) told a virtual news conference yesterday.
“That would compromise Taiwan’s sovereignty, and alter the status quo across the Taiwan Strait,” Wu told the event, which was organized by the Economic Democracy Union.
Such a concession would signal that Taiwan has surrendered to China and switched its allegiance from the alliance of democracies to a totalitarian regime, he said.
Taiwan must protect its sovereignty without giving up on protecting the human rights of Hong Kongers, he said.
Human rights are the cornerstone of Taiwan’s democracy and part of its responsibility as a member of the global camp of democratic states, Wu said.
The council should continue to help Hong Kong’s exiled democracy advocates, including with employment assistance, he said.
The Act Governing Relations with Hong Kong and Macau (香港澳門關係條例) was promulgated under the assumption that China would honor the Hong Kong Basic Law and the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Wu said.
As China has all but torn up those documents, the legal justification for treating Hong Kong and China differently is null and void, he said, adding that the Legislative Yuan should consider asserting Taiwan’s support for human rights by amending the act.
Taiwan should develop an institutionalized response to China’s legal instruments in Hong Kong that could be used to jail Taiwanese, such as the National Security Law and the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law, he said.
Economic Democracy Union convener Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強) said that the law treats investments from Hong Kong the same as those from elsewhere, but the territory’s loss of autonomy has made that position untenable.
Hong Kong-based firms that are owned in part or in full by Beijing-backed entities should be regulated as Chinese-based investors to stop them from influencing Taiwan’s economy, Lai said.
As the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement and Beijing’s 14th Five Year Plan showed, China intends to integrate Hong Kong and Macau into its economy, he said.
This makes the legal differentiation between Hong Kong and China-based investors unjustifiable and a potential loophole for China to abuse, he said.
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