Rogue Nation

China Wields Its "Laws" to Silence Critics From Abroad
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and CHRIS HORTON

Lee Ming-cheh, second from left, an activist from Taiwan, in court in the Chinese city of Yueyang, Hunan Province, last week. The case against Mr. Lee punctuates what critics warn are China’s efforts to stifle what it perceives as threats from overseas. 

BEIJING — On the morning he disappeared, the activist Lee Ming-cheh crossed from Macau into mainland China to meet with democracy advocates.
It was 177 days later when he reappeared in public, standing in the dock of a courtroom in central China last week, confessing to a conspiracy to subvert the Communist Party by circulating criticism on social media.
The circumstances surrounding Mr. Lee’s detainment remain murky, but what has made the case stand out from the many that the Chinese government brings against its critics is that Mr. Lee is not a citizen of China, but rather of Taiwan, the self-governing island over which Beijing claims sovereignty.
The proceedings against Mr. Lee, who is expected to be sentenced as soon as this week, punctuated what critics have warned are China’s brazen efforts to extend the reach of its security forces to stifle what it perceives as threats to its power emanating from overseas.
In recent months alone, China has sought the extradition of ethnic Uighur students studying overseas in Egypt and carried out the cinematic seizure of a billionaire from a Hong Kong hotel in violation of an agreement that allows the former British colony to run its own affairs. 

The billionaire, Xiao Jianhua, now appears to be a material witness in another politically tinged investigation against the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda.

China abruptly surfaced charges of "rape" against yet another billionaire, Guo Wengui, after he sought political asylum in the United States, where he has been making sensational accusations about the Communist Party’s leadership. 

Mr. Guo’s case could become a major test for the Trump administration’s relations with Beijing at a time of tensions over North Korea and trade.

The Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui has sought political asylum in the United States.

“China has been extending its clampdown — its choking of civil society — throughout the world, and often it is attempting this through official channels such as the U.N. or Interpol,” said Michael Caster, a rights campaigner who was a co-founder of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group. “Unfortunately, they’re very adept at doing it.”
The Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which provided seminars for lawyers and legal aid for defendants in China, folded last year after the country’s powerful Ministry of State Security arrested and held Mr. Caster’s colleague, Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, for 23 days.
Mr. Caster noted that Interpol’s president, Meng Hongwei, is a veteran of China’s state security apparatus. 

Human Rights Watch recently reported that China was blocking the work of United Nations agencies investigating rights issues and preventing critics from testifying at hearings, including in one case the leader of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa.
China’s economic clout has meant that few countries are willing to do much to challenge its extraterritorial legal maneuvers. 

Some have even gone along.
And countries as varied as Armenia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain and Vietnam have all extradited to China scores of people accused in a spate of telephone swindles targeting Chinese citizens, even though the suspects are, like Mr. Lee, citizens of Taiwan.
“Treating Lee Ming-cheh as a mainland Chinese marks a major watershed,” said Hsiao I-Min, a lawyer at the Judicial Reform Foundation in Taiwan, who accompanied Mr. Lee’s wife from Taiwan to attend the trial.

Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, was arrested in China and held for 23 days last year.

Mr. Lee’s case has added new strain in relations with Taiwan, which have soured since the election last year of a new president, Tsai Ing-wen. 

China has cut off official communications with Ms. Tsai’s government over her refusal to voice support for what Beijing calls the “1992 consensus,” which holds that the mainland and Taiwan are both part of the same China but leaves each side to interpret what that means.
In response to Mr. Lee’s legal odyssey, Ms. Tsai’s government has been relatively muted. 

“Our consistent position on this case is that we will do everything in our power to ensure his safe return while protecting the dignity of the nation,” said a spokesman for the presidential administration, Alex Huang.
China and Taiwan had in recent years cooperated on criminal investigations under a protocol that required each to notify the other in cases involving the arrests of its citizens. 

The Chinese government has recently abandoned such diplomatic niceties, officials in Taiwan say.
Taiwan’s government was notified of Mr. Lee’s arrest only when the public was — 10 days after his detainment in March near Macau, the former Portuguese colony that, like Hong Kong, is a special administrative region of China with its own legal system.
Mr. Lee, 42, assumed enormous risk to make contact with rights campaigners inside China. 

A manager at Wenshan Community College in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei, Mr. Lee volunteered for a rights organization called Covenants Watch and often traveled to the mainland.
Mr. Lee’s wife, Lee Ching-yu, learned his case had come to a head when a state-appointed lawyer contacted her this month. 

She only found out about his court appearance last week in Yueyang, in the southern province of Hunan, from news reports that circulated two days later, according to Patrick Poon, a researcher at Amnesty International.

Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Mr. Lee, departing for her husband’s trial in China from an airport in Taipei, Taiwan, this month. 

According to excerpts released by the Yueyang Intermediate People’s Court, Mr. Lee entered a guilty plea. 

He appeared with a Chinese co-defendant, Peng Yuhua, and together they were accused of trying to organize protests using the social media platforms WeChat and QQ, as well as Facebook, which is banned here.
Mr. Lee told the court that watching Chinese state television during his prolonged detention convinced him that he had been deceived by Taiwan’s free news media and was wrong about China’s political system. 

“These incorrect thoughts led me to criminal behavior,” he said.
Mr. Hsiao, the lawyer from Taiwan, said none of Mr. Lee’s acquaintances had heard of the co-defendant. 

Mr. Peng testified that together they had established chat groups online and formed a front organization, the Plum Blossom Company, with the aim of fomenting change. 

Mr. Hsiao said that no such company existed.
“He was a fake,” Mr. Hsiao said of Mr. Peng. 

“This guy does not really exist. He was playing a role.”
Ms. Lee, too, denounced her husband’s trial as a farce. 

“Today the world and I together witnessed political theater, as well as the differences between the core beliefs of Taiwan and China,” she said at her hotel in Yueyang, adding that the “norms of expression in Taiwan are tantamount to armed rebellion in China.”
Mr. Lee’s case has echoes of the fate of five booksellers in Hong Kong, four of whom who were spirited out of the semiautonomous city in the fall of 2015 after publishing gossipy material about Chinese political intrigues, which, while legal in Hong Kong, is not in China.
One bookseller, Lee Bo, is a British citizen. 

Another, Gui Minhai, is a naturalized Swedish citizen; he vanished from his seaside apartment in Pattaya, Thailand, in October 2015 and returned to China in a manner that has not been fully explained. 

He appeared on state television in January 2016 and said he had voluntarily returned to face punishment for a fatal car accident in 2003. 

He remains in prison.
“What happened to my father is a much larger issue,” Mr. Gui’s daughter, Angela Gui, who has been campaigning for his release, wrote in an email. 

“It shows that foreign citizens aren’t safe from Chinese state security, even when they are outside China’s borders. I find it strange that governments aren’t more worried about China’s new self-proclaimed role as world police.”

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

China Bars Professor at Australian University From Leaving

By CHRIS BUCKLEY

Feng Chongyi, associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney

BEIJING — A Chinese-born professor at an Australian university who has often criticized Beijing’s crackdown on political dissent has been barred from leaving China and is being questioned by state security officers as a suspected threat to national security, his lawyer said on Sunday.
The confinement of Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, or U.T.S., unfolded over the weekend while Li Keqiang visited Australia to promote deeper trade and diplomatic ties. 

Professor Feng’s case could cloud those ties.
The lawyer, Chen Jinxue, said Professor Feng had not been arrested or formally charged.
The professor has been staying in a hotel in Guangzhou, a city in southern China, and has been repeatedly questioned by national security officers after being stopped by entry-exit checkpoint officials on Friday and Saturday from taking flights back to Australia, Mr. Chen said from Guangzhou, where he was accompanying Professor Feng.
“He’s been told he’s suspected of involvement in a threat to national security,” Mr. Chen said by telephone, adding that Professor Feng declined to comment.

“His movements inside China aren’t officially restricted, but national security authorities have questioned him a number of times about who he’s met and that kind of thing,” the lawyer added. “They’ve told him that he’ll have to stay around for at least a couple more days to answer their questions.”
Professor Feng has been researching Chinese human rights lawyers, who have been subjected to a withering crackdown and detentions since 2015, and that work may have caught the attention of security investigators, Mr. Chen said.
Li Keqiang ended a five-day visit to Australia on Sunday, and it was unclear whether the professor came up during his talks with Australian politicians. 

But that nation’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it could not demand to see Professor Feng because he is not an Australian citizen.
“The Australian Government is aware that a U.T.S. professor, who is an Australian permanent resident, has been prevented from leaving China,” the department said in an email. 

Under an agreement with China, the department said, “the Australian government is able to provide consular assistance only to Australian citizens who have entered China on their Australian passport.”
Professor Feng, 56, was born in southern China. 

His lawyer confirmed he has permanent residence in Australia and was not a citizen. 

Even so, the case has ignited demands that the Australian government do more to secure his quick release.
“We are urging the Australian government to intervene,” John Hu, a spokesman in Sydney for the Embracing Australian Values Alliance, which has sought to promote free speech and counter the Chinese government’s influence over the ethnic Chinese community in Australia.
“Right now the excuse for their inaction is that Chongyi Feng is only a permanent resident but not a citizen,” said Mr. Hu, who is a friend of Mr. Feng’s. 

“Feng has not breached the Chinese law — his doings were not even in China’s jurisdiction, and the Chinese government has no right to persecute him.”
The university has been in contact with Professor Feng and was helping his family, Greg Walsh, a university spokesman, said by email.
The professor is probably better known in Chinese intellectual circles than in Australia. 

A historian, he has long been involved in debates about China’s future, advocating a path of political liberalization.
He has also criticized the Chinese government’s increasing efforts to exert influence over ethnic Chinese in Australia. 

Last year, he spoke out against plans for concerts honoring Mao Zedong in Sydney Town Hall and Melbourne Town Hall.
“Australia is proud of its commitment to free speech, tolerance and cultural diversity,” he wrote. “However, should intolerance be tolerated? Should lies about Mao and promotion of Maoism, which denies freedom of speech, be allowed as a legitimate part of free speech?”
With its growing ethnic Chinese population and growing economic ties to China, Australia has experienced a succession of cases of residents or citizens being detained in China, creating tensions over their legal rights and access to Australian diplomats. 

In 2011, Yang Hengjun, a writer and former Chinese official who had migrated to Australia, was detained for days in Guangzhou by security officials.
Until the 1960s, Australia excluded Chinese migrants through the “White Australia” policy. 

In recent decades, the number of migrants from China has grown drastically, and by 2015, nearly 500,000 of Australia’s 24 million residents had been born in China.
The disappearance of those seen as acting against China’s interests has stirred concerns in other territories. 

A Taiwanese activist for human rights and democratic rights, Lee Ming-cheh, has been missing since last Sunday morning, when he boarded a flight from Taipei to Macau but never emerged from the arrivals gate. 

His friends and family fear he may have been detained by the Chinese authorities.
As Xi Jinping has clamped down on dissent, Professor Feng and other advocates of political relaxation have no longer been able to write for the domestic Chinese news media. 

But on overseas Chinese websites and in interviews with foreign journalists, he has sharply criticized Beijing’s clampdown.
“Since Xi Jinping came to office, he has not only failed to lead China forward in reform and opening up and constitutional government, he has made an historical U-turn,” he wrote last year.