Taiwanese are sometimes forced to apply for Chinese national identification documents when they cannot repay loans at pawn shops, YouTuber Wen Tzu-yu (溫子渝), who is known as Pa Chiung (八炯) online, said in a video published yesterday.
A Kaoshiung resident in the video said a pawn shop that he borrowed money from told him he could borrow money from a bank in China’s Fujian Province after he was unable to repay the loan.
However, he would have to apply for a Chinese ID, as being a citizen would give him a higher borrowing ceiling, he told Pa Chiung.
Photo: Screen grab from a video on Pa Chiung’s YouTube channel
The man, whose voice was altered and face obscured in the video, said that the pawn shop told him to record a video stating the date of the recording, that he had not been coerced, and that he had read the details of the pawn shop’s loan contract and would abide by it.
The Telegram messaging app was the favored method of communication, he said.
Pa Chiung said in the video that since April, he and his team have uncovered 10 cases of people in similar situations.
He and his team contacted some of the people who had applied for Chinese resident or ID cards and found that they had all used the same residential address: “No. 66, Tongxin Road, Jianyang District, Nanping City, Fujian Province,” which is the address of a police precinct, he said.
The scheme might involve Chinese village officials and bank employees working through Taiwanese intermediaries, he said.
However, while his team was able to expose the issue, there was no official investigation into the matter, he said.
His team would give the information it had to the authorities and hopefully those involved would be arrested so that Taiwanese would not become “fifth columnists” in a possible invasion of Taiwan, he said.
National Cheng Kung University professor Hung Ching-fu (洪敬富) said that the reports highlight concerning loopholes in Taiwan’s national security.
China’s psychological warfare against Taiwan would only grow more severe with more people holding Chinese IDs, Hung said.
China’s “united front” departments need to demonstrate to their superiors that their rhetoric is effective, he said.
By showing that there are Taiwanese applying for Chinese IDs reinforces Beijing’s arguments that “Taiwanese are thinking of their motherland,” he said, adding that Beijing would continue with such tactics.
China’s attempts to increase the number of Taiwanese with Chinese IDs, especially young people, show that it still hopes to one day have complete judicial control over Taiwan, he said.
Some pawn shops and jewelry shops in Taiwan have long operated as unregistered remittance sites for the Chinese Communist Party, he said, adding that they are a gap in national security.
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