The New Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday charged Chinese immigrant Xu Chunying (徐春鶯), who has links to the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with suspicion of taking part in Beijing-directed election interference.
The office said in the indictment that Xu, despite being a legal resident, had secretly maintained loyalty to China, performing tasks ranging from election meddling to spying on the Chinese immigrant community for a hostile foreign power.
Prosecutors are charging Xu with contravening the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), the Banking Act (銀行法) as well as for fraud and forgery under the Criminal Code, it said.
Photo: Taipei Times
Xu, a resident of Taiwan by marriage since 1998 and director of the Taiwan New Immigrant Development Association, routinely traveled to China under the pretext of serving Chinese spouses in Taiwan, the office said.
On those trips, she was recruited by Chinese officials as an asset that provided Beijing with intelligence on Taiwanese political developments and elections, it said.
Taiwanese prosecutors identified Xu’s handlers as Yang Wentao (楊文濤), director of the Service Center for Cross-Strait Marriages and Families at the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs and Sun Xian (孫憲), deputy head of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang in Shanghai.
Chung Chin-ming (鍾錦明), chairman of the Taiwan-based Cross-Strait Marriage Harmony Promotion Association, was a close associate of Xu’s and an accomplice in her activities, the office said.
Xu monitored the speech and political activities of Chinese immigrants living in Taiwan under her handler’s direction, it said.
Xu had been a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) member, but became disillusioned with the party over its perceived failure to ease Chinese immigrants’ path to residency and unwillingness to nominate Chinese-born candidates for legislators-at-large, it said.
In 2022, Xu’s Chinese handlers instructed her to support Vivian Huang’s (黃珊珊) campaign for Taipei mayor, who ran as an independent candidate, the office said.
Xu subsequently campaigned for Huang, targeting Chinese immigrant voters who have Taiwanese spouses, it said.
When then-TPP chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) selected Huang as his running mate in the 2024 presidential election, Chinese officials authorized Xu to campaign for Ko, apparently at her instigation, the office said.
Xu continued to interfere in Taiwanese political campaigns, using her ability to drum up votes in exchange for political parties to allocate a legislator-at-large seat to Chinese immigrants, it said.
Xu herself was tapped by the TPP to serve as a legislator-at-large in 2023, but she turned down the offer.
The only Chinese-born legislator-at-large serving in the Legislative Yuan is Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) of the TPP, who is embroiled in a scandal involving her alleged failure to renounce her Chinese nationality.
The office additionally alleged that Xu engaged in illegal currency trading and took out loans on false pretenses for personal benefit.
Her alleged acts of financial fraud netted an estimated profit of NT$27.21 million (US$849,569), it said.
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