A missing person report has not been received from the family of Liao Meng-yen (廖孟彥), a Taiwanese writer allegedly imprisoned in China on charges related to publishing unauthorized material, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said yesterday.
The statement was released after a post on the Professional Technology Temple (PTT) online bulletin board said that the author, who uses the nom de plume Ronson (羅森) and writes erotic material, was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
The writer’s China-based Web site has been inaccessible since September last year and the most recent post on his Chinese social media account was in November last year, the PTT post said.
Photo: Reuters
Social media posts showed that Liao moved to China following the collapse of the Taiwanese adult book market in the early 2000s, but ran afoul of local authorities, the PTT post said.
The foundation said that Liao’s family had not asked for help, but officials would do all they could to retrieve a person in such a situation if aid was requested.
Liao was known to publish content for He Tu Culture, a Web site run by Taiwan-based Tai Gu He Tu Culture Publishing, which lists him as a representative.
The writer’s content mainly revolves around sadomasochism and sexual violence against women.
Chinese state-owned Xinhua news agency — citing the Chinese Ministry of Public Security’s Bureau of Network Security Protection — on Feb. 7 reported that Chinese police arrested a man surnamed Liao for “propagating obscene messages in the guise of fantasy novels.”
The man was part of a “well-organized and profit-sharing crime group” that published e-books containing banned materials via an app named “He X Novels” targeting underaged readers, it said, using a censored version of the app’s name.
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