{"id":558,"date":"2017-09-22T10:46:34","date_gmt":"2017-09-22T10:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=558"},"modified":"2017-10-02T11:01:37","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T11:01:37","slug":"emboldened-china-wields-its-laws-to-silence-critics-from-abroad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/?p=558","title":{"rendered":"Emboldened China Wields Its Laws to Silence Critics From Abroad"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"\"<\/a>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\u2019s efforts to stifle what it perceives as threats from overseas.<\/div>\n
YUEYANG INTERMEDIATE PEOPLE’S COURT, VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE \u2014 GETTY IMAGES<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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By\u00a0STEVEN\u00a0LEE\u00a0MYERS and\u00a0CHRIS\u00a0HORTON<\/div>\n

SEPTEMBER 20, 2017<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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BEIJING \u2014 On the morning he disappeared, the activist Lee Ming-cheh crossed from Macau into mainland China to meet with democracy advocates.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The circumstances surrounding Mr. Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The proceedings against Mr. Lee, who is expected to be sentenced as soon as this week, punctuated what critics have warned are China\u2019s brazen efforts to extend the reach of its security forces to stifle what it perceives as threats to its power emanating from overseas.<\/p>\n

In recent months alone, China has sought the\u00a0extradition of ethnic Uighur students<\/a>studying overseas in Egypt and carried out the\u00a0cinematic seizure<\/a>\u00a0of 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\u00a0material witness<\/a>\u00a0in another politically tinged investigation against the Chinese conglomerate Dalian Wanda.<\/p>\n

China abruptly surfaced charges of rape against yet another billionaire, Guo Wengui, after he\u00a0sought political asylum<\/a>\u00a0in the United States, where he has been making sensational accusations about the Communist Party\u2019s leadership. Mr. Guo\u2019s case could become a major test for the Trump administration\u2019s relations with Beijing at a time of tensions over North Korea and trade.<\/p>\n

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The Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui has sought political asylum in the United States.<\/p>\n

JAMES ESTRIN \/ THE NEW YORK TIMES<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u201cChina has been extending its clampdown \u2014 its choking of civil society \u2014 throughout the world, and often it is attempting this through official channels such as the U.N. or Interpol,\u201d said Michael Caster, a rights campaigner who was a co-founder of the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group. \u201cUnfortunately, they\u2019re very adept at doing it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, which provided seminars for lawyers and legal aid for defendants in China, folded last year after the country\u2019s powerful Ministry of State Security\u00a0arrested and held<\/a>\u00a0Mr. Caster\u2019s colleague, Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, for 23 days.<\/p>\n

Mr. Caster noted that Interpol\u2019s president,\u00a0Meng Hongwei<\/a>, is a veteran of China\u2019s state security apparatus. Human Rights Watch recently reported that\u00a0China was blocking the work of United Nations agencies<\/a>\u00a0investigating rights issues and preventing critics from testifying at hearings, including in one case the leader of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa.<\/p>\n

China\u2019s economic and diplomatic clout has meant that few countries are willing or able to do much to challenge its extraterritorial legal maneuvers. Some have even gone along.<\/p>\n

And countries as varied as Armenia, Cambodia, Indonesia, Kenya, Spain and Vietnam have all extradited to China scores of people accused in\u00a0a spate of telephone swindles<\/a>\u00a0targeting Chinese citizens, even though the suspects are, like Mr. Lee, citizens of Taiwan.<\/p>\n

\u201cTreating Lee Ming-cheh as a mainland Chinese marks a major watershed,\u201d said Hsiao I-Min, a lawyer at the Judicial Reform Foundation in Taiwan, who accompanied Mr. Lee\u2019s wife from Taiwan to attend the trial.<\/p>\n

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Peter Dahlin, a Swedish citizen, was arrested in China and held for 23 days last year.<\/p>\n

ADAM DEAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Mr. Lee\u2019s case has added new strain in relations with Taiwan, which have soured since\u00a0the election last year of a new president<\/a>, Tsai Ing-wen. China has cut off official communications with Ms. Tsai\u2019s government over her refusal to voice support for what Beijing calls the \u201c1992 consensus,\u201d which holds that the mainland and Taiwan are both part of the same China but leaves each side to interpret what that means.<\/p>\n

In response to Mr. Lee\u2019s legal odyssey, Ms. Tsai\u2019s government has been relatively muted. \u201cOur 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,\u201d said a spokesman for the presidential administration, Alex Huang.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Taiwan\u2019s government was notified of Mr. Lee\u2019s arrest only when the public was \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Whatever the veracity of his courtroom confession, Mr. Lee, 42, assumed enormous risk to make contact with rights campaigners inside China. A manager at Wenshan Community College in Taiwan\u2019s capital, Taipei, Mr. Lee volunteered for a rights organization called Covenants Watch and often traveled to the mainland.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Mr. Lee, departing for her husband\u2019s trial in China from an airport in Taipei, Taiwan, this month.<\/div>\n
TYRONE SIU \/ REUTERS<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

According to excerpts released by the Yueyang Intermediate People\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Mr. Lee told the court that watching Chinese state television during his prolonged detention convinced him that he had been deceived by Taiwan\u2019s free news media and was wrong about China\u2019s political system. \u201cThese incorrect thoughts led me to criminal behavior,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Hsiao, the lawyer from Taiwan, said none of Mr. Lee\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was a fake,\u201d Mr. Hsiao said of Mr. Peng. \u201cThis guy does not really exist. He was playing a role.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ms. Lee, too, denounced her husband\u2019s trial as a farce. \u201cToday the world and I together witnessed political theater, as well as the differences between the core beliefs of Taiwan and China,\u201d she said at her hotel in Yueyang, adding that the \u201cnorms of expression in Taiwan are tantamount to armed rebellion in China.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Lee\u2019s case has echoes of the fate of\u00a0five booksellers in Hong Kong<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened to my father is a much larger issue,\u201d Mr. Gui\u2019s daughter, Angela Gui, who has been campaigning for his release, wrote in an email. \u201cIt shows that foreign citizens aren\u2019t safe from Chinese state security, even when they are outside China\u2019s borders. I find it strange that governments aren\u2019t more worried about China\u2019s new self-proclaimed role as world police.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing, and Chris Horton from Taipei, Taiwan.<\/em><\/p>\n

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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\u2019s efforts to stifle what it perceives as threats from overseas. YUEYANG INTERMEDIATE PEOPLE’S COURT, VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE \u2014 GETTY IMAGES By\u00a0STEVEN\u00a0LEE\u00a0MYERS and\u00a0CHRIS\u00a0HORTON SEPTEMBER […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia","category-uyghur-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=558"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":560,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558\/revisions\/560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/akademiye.org\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}