TAIPEI - China’s detention of a Taiwanese political activist on suspicion of endangering national security is causing a new rift in already strained relations between Taipei and Beijing.



China has held Lee Ming-che for 23 days, saying he is suspected of endangering state security. On Monday, his wife found out that China had revoked her travel permit,shortly before taking a flight to Beijing, where she planned to pursue information on Lee’s detention.



The case is straining government-to-government relations already hobbled by a 70-year-old sovereignty dispute and a freeze in formal dialogue over the past year, Taiwan officials and scholars say.



“We urge the mainland Chinese side to look at this issue correctly and respond immediately including with a speedy disclosure of the real reasons and location of detention as well as let family visit as soon as possible to avoid complicating matters and even causing impacts that neither side wants to see,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement Monday.

The extent of any impact on relations hinges on how long China holds Lee, a 42-year-old philosophy scholar and former worker with Taiwan’s ruling party, and what they eventually charge him with, scholars in Taiwan say.

“It’s already been a few days, so many days, and there’s still no clear word [on the Lee case], said Huang Kwei-bo, associate diplomacy professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “Taiwanese society, from the point of view of Taiwan’s rule of law, everyone will find this to be very strange.”



The two sides have been separately ruled since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war of the 1940s and fled to Taiwan. China still claims sovereignty over Taiwan, but government polls in Taiwan show most people prefer their autonomy.

Taiwan and China

Impact on Chinese relations



Whether Lee’s case dents broader China-Taiwan relations depends on whether Beijing offers more information and how long that takes, said Lee Li-chen, deputy secretary general of the Straits Exchange Foundation, an agency in Taipei that handles consular-style matters with China.



“The public hopes that safety can be guaranteed in China. If someone like Lee can be held for investigation, then they hope they can quickly know for what reason he has been locked up and where he’s locked up as well as hoping family can visit,” she said.

“So in terms of the development of cross-Strait [China-Taiwan] relations, we’re still observing how the mainland China side handles follow-up to the Lee Ming-che case," Lee Li-chen said.



Between one and three million Taiwanese live in China, with many of them there to run factories.



Under current Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, the two sides have not agreed on how to regard each other politically, stopping dialogue since she took office in May.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast c Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast combat support ship during her trip at a navy base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 21, 2017. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast combat support ship during her trip at a navy base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 21, 2017.

China has passed its aircraft carrier around the island 160 kilometers away, persuaded a diplomatic ally to cut ties with Taiwan and scaled back tourism to express its disapproval, analysts in Taipei believe.



Lee Ming-che disappeared March 19 after a flight from Taipei to the Chinese territory of Macau and before crossing a land border into mainland China where a friend was waiting, colleagues in Taipei say. They say he was on his way to Guangzhou to see friends and get Chinese medicine for his mother in-law.



China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on March 29 that Lee was being questioned on suspicion he took part in activities that endangered state security.



Lee had visited China once a year over the past decade, sometimes to help Chinese lawyers in human rights cases, a fellow human rights worker in Taipei said. Police in China have “targeted” 248 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists in a crackdown since July 2015, London-based advocacy group Amnesty International says.



He had also used social media to reach about 100 people in China for discussions about democracy and human rights in Taiwan, said Cheng Hsiu-chuan, president of Lee’s Taipei employer, Wenshan Community College.



Some Taiwanese believe China is detaining the activist to answer Taiwan’s arrest in early March of a mainland Chinese business administration student who was suspected of spying. Others find “no cause” to get upset so far, said Nathan Liu, international affairs and diplomacy professor at Ming Chuan University in Taiwan.



“I don’t see too much sympathetic reaction for this case,” Liu said. “We don’t really know what happened and nothing like he got tortured or some unjust call.”



“Taiwanese people may feel confused by the case. They consider democracy to be “normal” and see China’s legal treatment of pro-democracy activism in the Communist country as a “grey area,” Huang said.



In Taiwan, Lee worked as a college program manager and volunteered for a league of Taiwan human rights groups gathering information on international laws to make sure Taiwan was complying.



</s>The wife of a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist detained in China said Monday that she was prevented from flying to the mainland to seek a visit with her husband, whose case has inflamed tensions between the sides that have already sunk to their lowest level in years.

Lee Ching-yu said airline staff told her when she tried to check in for her flight that Beijing authorities had canceled her Chinese-issued travel permit. Li was hoping to fly to China to demand information about her husband, Lee Ming-che, who has not been heard from since March 19.

A Chinese official said last week that Lee was under investigation on suspicion of endangering Chinese national security and was in "good physical condition," but offered no additional information. Lee Ching-yu says her husband suffers from hypertension and has asked that medication be provided to him.

Lee, a college employee who used the WeChat social media platform to discuss China-Taiwan relations, is the first Taiwanese activist in years to be held by China on security charges. His colleagues said his account on WeChat — a mainland China-based service used broadly in the Chinese-speaking world — had been shut down by Chinese authorities in mid-2016, suggesting he had attracted government attention.

Lee, 42, formerly worked for the Democratic Progressive Party, which has advocated for Taiwan's formal independence. He was due to meet a friend in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on March 19 but never arrived.

China cut off its already limited contacts with Taiwan's government in June, five months after the DPP's Tsai Ing-wen was elected president. Since then, China has been seen as further restricting the island's already limited diplomatic breathing space while bringing economic pressure to bear.

Trailed by a scrum of supporters and media, Lee Ching-yu was turned away at the check-in counter by an Air China employee who said the airline had been informed by Beijing that her permit to visit the mainland had been voided, without providing details. China regards Taiwan as part of its territory and requires the island's residents to use a document called a Taiwan Compatriots Pass rather than their passport when traveling to the mainland.

"I wonder why China needs to stop me, a defenseless woman, from visiting," Li told reporters at the airport.

Monday's drama raises the stakes in a case already complicated by the absence of formal cross-strait diplomatic channels. The Taiwanese government department responsible for relations with China says its requests for information about Lee have largely gone ignored.

Lee Ching-yu said Sunday that a middleman who claimed to have Chinese government contacts sought to persuade her not to make the trip, saying that her husband would be released soon if she acted in an "obedient and quietly cooperative" manner. If not, Lee said, the middleman suggested that Chinese state television would air a confession extracted from her husband.

Taiwanese media on Monday disclosed the middleman's identity as former Taiwanese intelligence officer Lee Chun-min, who told the press that he would no longer work on the case.

National security crimes in China are broadly defined and have a range of penalties. Authorities usually release little or no information on the specific allegations, citing the need to protect state secrets.

Powers of the security services in dealing with foreign groups and their Chinese partners were strongly enhanced under a law that took effect in January, leading to concerns about further prosecutions and restrictions on civil society.

In recent years, China's state security apparatus has detained foreign activists, domestic lawyers and other political elements it considers hostile and extracted and aired video confessions as proof that they were working to undermine China's national security. In several instances, the detainees recanted their confessions upon their release.</s>Taipei, April 10 The wife of a Taiwanese human rights activist arrested in China could not travel to Beijing on Monday after her entry permit into the country was revoked. Lee Ching-yu, whose husband Lee Ming-che has been detained since March 19 at an undisclosed location in China for alleged acts against national security, told the media at Taipei airport that she will not allow herself to be manipulated, Efe news reported.

Start the conversation, or Read more at India.com.</s>The wife of a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist detained in China said Monday that she was prevented from flying to the mainland to seek a visit with her husband, whose case has inflamed tensions between the sides that have already sunk to their lowest level in years. Lee Ching-yu said airline staff told her when she tried to check in for her flight that Beijing authorities had canceled her Chinese-issued travel permit.

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People's Republic of China detains Taiwanese political activist Lee Ming-che on suspicion of endangering national security and revokes his wife's travel permit.