TAIPEI – The detention of Taiwan-based publisher Li Yanhe, who has released books critical of China’s ruling Communist Party, has stoked concerns about Beijing’s growing arsenal of tactics to put pressure on Taiwan amid soaring cross-strait tensions.
Mr Chiu Tai-san, head of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, warned of Beijing’s “long-arm jurisdiction” in a parliamentary session on Wednesday, the day when the Chinese authorities confirmed they were investigating the publisher, who had disappeared while visiting his family in Shanghai.
“There is the smell of intimidation in this, and it’s a show of suppression by them,” he said, adding that the Taiwanese authorities were in contact with Mr Li’s immediate family in Taiwan and offering assistance.
Mr Li is the editor-in-chief of Gusa Publishing, which has printed titles touching on topics that are taboo in China, such as the human rights abuses against the Uighur minority in Xinjiang and the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident.
Exiled Chinese dissident Wang Dan, a former Tiananmen Square student protest leader, wrote on Facebook on Wednesday: “Even though he published books that the Communist Party of China would not be happy about, can publishing a book really put China’s national security at risk?
“Obviously... the real purpose is to intimidate the Taiwanese.”
Beijing claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan and has stepped up efforts to undermine the island, including squeezing its diplomatic space internationally, as well as various grey-zone tactics, which are coercive actions designed to intimidate while stopping short of an actual war. These include a recent spate of Taiwanese being arrested while in China.
On Wednesday, China’s Taiwan Affairs Council said that Mr Li, who is also known by his pen name Fucha, is under investigation for suspected national security crimes, a week after his industry peers sounded the alarm online over his apparent disappearance while visiting his Chinese family.
According to Taiwan media reports, Mr Li, 52, who was born in Liaoning province, was also seeking to renounce his Chinese citizenship during the trip. He has obtained Taiwanese citizenship since marrying a Taiwanese and moving to the island in 2009, reports said, citing his friends.
Beijing’s confirmation of Mr Li’s detention came a day after the Chinese authorities formally pressed secession charges against Taiwanese activist Yang Chih-yuan, leader of a minor political party advocating for the island’s formal independence. He was detained in the Chinese port city of Wenzhou in August 2022, hours after then United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taipei in a trip that raised Beijing’s ire.
Reports earlier in April said that two Taiwan-based television reporters, identified only by their surnames Huang and Li, had been detained in Fujian while filming military exercises there.
Such moves by Beijing will not scare Taiwanese people, but only harden them, said Dr Chen Shih-min, a political scientist at National Taiwan University.
“Fucha’s work is not criminal in Taiwan, so if he’s being detained in China because he printed some politically sensitive books, then the Taiwanese people will feel even more certain that their lives are different from (those of) the Chinese,” said Dr Chen. “It’s not a smart move on Beijing’s part because it’ll just push the Taiwanese even further away from the idea of unification with China.”
Based on the latest data in a long-running survey by Taipei’s National Chengchi University, 1.2 per cent of Taiwanese say that they want to pursue unification as soon as possible. More than 88 per cent prefer to have the status quo of de facto independence maintained in some form.
Mr Li’s case has sparked comparisons with 2015’s high-profile arrest of five Hong Kong booksellers linked to Causeway Bay Books, which sold titles critical of China’s elite.
One of the booksellers, Mr Lam Wing Kee, skipped bail in Hong Kong in 2016 and fled to Taiwan, where he has re-established the bookstore in a busy Taipei shopping district.
He fears that Mr Li may never be released, given that he was born in China. “He published books that violated the laws of his birth country, which I believe is very serious,” Mr Lam said, adding that the detention is Beijing’s warning to the rest of Taiwan’s publishing industry.
Other publishers in Taiwan told The Straits Times that the detention will not stop them from printing material that may be considered politically sensitive by China – even if the demand for such books is low on the island.
Out of more than 40,000 books published annually in Taiwan, only about 300 would fall into that category, they said.
“But we serve our readers, so as long as we think there is information that people should learn about, we’ll keep publishing them,” said Mr Liao Chih-feng, the head of publishing company Asian Culture, whose titles include one on an online survey censored in China asking Internet users if they would choose to be Chinese again in their next life.
Mr Liao said he has no plans of visiting China again in the near future, his last visit there being five years ago. Citing the Causeway Bay Books incident, he said he is not even comfortable transiting through Hong Kong or Macau.
Mr Cheng Chou-ray, the founder of Lordway Publishing, which has also printed a number of titles critical of China, shares the same worry. Years ago, he would regularly travel to the Chinese capital Beijing to visit a major book fair, but “things are different now”.
He said: “We were all surprised that Fucha went to China at all, when his friends have repeatedly warned him not to go. I have a wife and daughter – it’s just not worth the risk.”
