Criminal Nation

After a Famed Prisoner Dies in China, Taiwan Fears for Another
By CHRIS HORTON

Pictures of Lee Ming-cheh, left, a rights advocate from Taiwan, and Tashi Wangchuk, an education advocate from Tibet, during a commemoration last month in Taiwan of the 1989 pro-democracy crackdown in China. Both men are in Chinese custody. 

TAIPEI, Taiwan — For many in Taiwan, the death in custody last week of the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo had double relevance.
It was a reminder of how much Taiwan — but not China — has changed politically since the late 1980s, when both were one-party, authoritarian states.
On Saturday, Taiwan, now a full-fledged democracy, celebrated the 30th anniversary of the end of four decades of martial law. 

On Tuesday, at the opening of the first Asian bureau of Reporters Without Borders, an organization that advocates press freedom, Wu’er Kaixi, a leader of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing, dedicated a moment of silence to Mr. Liu, while praising Taiwan’s progress.
But the death of Mr. Liu, who was serving an 11-year prison sentence for his role in Charter 08, a manifesto for peaceful political change, also deepened concerns over the fate of Lee Ming-cheh, a human rights advocate from Taiwan who went missing after his arrival in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong in March.
More than a week passed before Chinese officials announced that Mr. Lee had been detained. 

In April, Mr. Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, was blocked from entering China, where she said she hoped to take him his blood-pressure medication. 

In late May, Mr. Lee was officially arrested on a charge of “subverting state power.”

It has not been lost on Mr. Lee’s family and friends, or the news media in Taiwan, that the charge he faces is similar to the one brought against Mr. Liu, of “inciting subversion of state power.”

Hours after Mr. Liu’s death, Taiwan’s state-owned Central News Agency reported that the governing Democratic Progressive Party had issued a statement calling on China to release Mr. Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, who was placed under house arrest in 2010, as well as Mr. Lee.
Comparing the plights of Mr. Liu and Mr. Lee, a commentary this month in a Taiwan newspaper, Liberty Times, asked: “Will Lee Ming-cheh be the next Liu Xiaobo?”
“What’s similar is that Lee Ming-cheh and Liu Xiaobo were both arrested for the crime of ‘subversion of state power,’” it said. 

“What’s different is that Liu Xiaobo is Chinese, whereas Lee Ming-cheh is Taiwanese. After Lee Ming-cheh entered prison, will he ‘get sick’ or be forcefully ‘sickened’? This deserves attention.”
Nongovernmental organization workers from Taiwan who travel to China should remain on a high state of alert, the commentary added. 

“You absolutely do not want to become the next Lee Ming-cheh,” it said.
In a letter to The Washington Post published on Sunday, Stanley Kao, Taiwan’s envoy to the United States, also connected the cases.
“Mr. Liu’s lifelong beliefs are the core values we live by in Taiwan, namely an abiding respect for human rights and due process of law,” Mr. Kao wrote, adding that China should immediately release Mr. Lee.
Beijing severed official communication channels with Taiwan in the fall after it became apparent that President Tsai Ing-wen, who took office in May last year, would not bow to Chinese pressure to endorse the “1992 consensus,” which holds that China and Taiwan agree there is “one China” — with each side reserving its own interpretation of what that means. 

Beijing has insisted that self-ruled Taiwan is part of its territory, and it has not renounced the use of force to achieve unification.
That has left the Tsai administration with limited tools to press Beijing for information about Mr. Lee. Ms. Tsai — one of the first government leaders to issue a statement mourning Mr. Liu’s death — has taken to her Twitter account to call for Mr. Lee’s release.
If history is any guide, progress on Mr. Lee’s case is unlikely in the coming weeks. 

The Chinese Communist Party is preparing for its 19th Party Congress this fall, a meeting that will determine the leadership lineup under Xi Jinping for the next five years and influence the succession beyond that. 

In the jockeying for power, concessions to Taiwan could be interpreted as a sign of weakness.
Eeling Chiu, secretary general of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights, has supported Ms. Lee’s efforts to rally international pressure on China to free her husband. 

Ms. Chiu said that there had been no information about Mr. Lee’s situation aside from occasional statements from Beijing, such as the announcement last month that a lawyer had been appointed to represent him.
“We haven’t heard anything new since they announced they’d appointed him a lawyer,” she said in an interview, dismissing the gesture as “fake.” 

“We don’t even know who the lawyer is. If you’re trying to provide for the rights of someone involved in legal proceedings, getting in touch with their family is one of the most basic things you should do.”
The Tsai administration says it will continue to work on Mr. Lee’s behalf. 

“The government is doing everything it can to secure Mr. Lee’s release as soon as possible,” Alex Huang, the spokesman for the presidential office, said on Tuesday.

Rogue Nation

Wife of Taiwanese Rights Activist Detained in China Speaks Out About His Disappearance
By Nicola Smith / Taipei

In this photo taken March 24, 2017, Lee Ching-yu, third from right, holds up a photo of her missing husband, Taiwanese pro-democracy activist Lee Ming-che.

The wife of a Taiwanese human-rights activist who went missing in China 10 days ago has demanded his release after the Chinese authorities confirmed Wednesday that Lee Ming-che had been detained for allegedly threatening national security.
“My husband is passionate about human rights,” Lee Ching-yu told a packed news conference at Taiwan’s parliament in the capital, Taipei. 

“He is innocent. Free Mr. Lee!” she shouted, flanked by legislators and rights activists.
News of Lee Ming-che's arrest was released by Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office on Wednesday after more than a week of snubbed requests for information from his family and Taiwanese authorities. 

The announcement from Beijing confirms fears that he is the latest victim of an escalation in China’s repression of civil rights and free speech.
Lee Ming-che disappeared while traveling from the semiautonomous Chinese territory of Macau to the southern city of Guangzhou, just days before Chongyi Feng, a China-born Australian academic researching human rights, was barred from leaving the same city.
Human-rights groups believe Lee Ming-che may have been caught up in a campaign of targeted disappearances after a raft of new national security laws gave sweeping powers to emboldened Chinese police forces.
Lee Ching-yu believes her husband, a community-college manager, may have been targeted through new, strict regulations to monitor and control foreign-funded NGOs, which could have put his human-rights activities on the radar of the national security apparatus for the first time.
Although not a high-profile activist, Lee Ming-che encouraged fundraising for families of Chinese human-rights workers, and discussed China-Taiwan relations on popular messaging app WeChat. “This kind of behavior is perfectly normal in a civilized country,” says Lee Ching-yu.
Earlier this week, Lee Ching-yu, who works as a human-rights researcher, told TIME that she was blindsided when her college-sweetheart husband of 20 years vanished. 

As she dropped him off for an early morning flight from Taipei to Macau on March 19, there had been no discussion about possible dangers.
“On the way to the airport we talked about our family. My husband comforted me about my mother, and reassured me that she would recover,” she says, explaining that her mother had breast cancer.
Initially his wife did not worry when she heard nothing after his 8 a.m. flight. 

The gnawing fears only set in that afternoon, when his friends waiting in Guangzhou messaged her to inquire where he was. 

She contacted the airline, his hotel, any authorities she could reach, to track him down. 

For nine anxious days, she waited for news.
It was Lee Ching-yu's dogged determination that likely provoked the Chinese authorities to finally break their silence over her husband's detention. 

On Tuesday, she handed over his hypertension medicine to officials at the Straits Exchange Foundation, a Taiwanese government-backed body that acts as an unofficial intermediary between Taipei and Beijing. 

The foundation’s attempts to locate her husband had been ignored, but Lee Ching-yu's stunt appeared to work.
“Taiwan resident Lee Ming-che allegedly engaged in activities endangering our national security and is under investigation by relevant authorities,” said Ma Xiaoguang, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the Chinese State Council, on Wednesday. 

Ma said that Lee Ming-che's health was "satisfactory," but gave no further details about his current location or the accusations against him.
Lee Ching-yu's decision to publicize her husband’s case was driven by a resolve to put the spotlight on human rights and to stress that he had committed no crime.
“People now care more about human-rights issues because of our problem," she says. 

"People have the right to legally go to China. It’s not only about my husband but about other NGO workers."
At Wenshan Community College, where Lee Ming-che works, director Cheng Shiouw-jiuan says his disappearance had awakened the students’ interest in human rights. 

And Amnesty International has also taken up his case.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the threshold of intolerance towards dissent in China has considerably lowered in recent months and years,” says Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director at Amnesty International.
“In this general climate of political hardening and an attempt to blacken and demonize human-rights activists and dissidents as traitors ... and with the NGO law in the background, what Mr. Lee was or wasn’t doing before clearly is not seen in the same light, however innocuous it was,” he says.
Lee Ming-che, who volunteers for human-rights group Covenant Watch, is the first Taiwanese NGO worker to disappear on mainland China, sending chills through Taiwan’s civil rights community. “We’re not sure if it’s safe for human-rights staff to go to China," says Chiu E-ling, head of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights.
Lee Ming-che's situation has been complicated by Taiwan’s frosty relations with Beijing, which views the self-governed island democracy as a renegade province that must eventually be reunited with the mainland. 

The Taiwan government’s Mainland Affairs Council, the primary agency for dealing with Beijing, has demanded that Chinese government departments disclose their “handling” of Lee Ming-che and ensure his safety.
“I don’t know if the government is really helping or not, but I would prefer to trust them,” his wife says.
Her biggest priority for now, is to honor her husband’s values.
“For the past 20 years he has been fighting for human rights, even when it hasn’t been successful," Lee Ching-yu says. 

"He believes that if you do nothing, nothing will change."