The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), a semi-official organization created by the government of Taiwan, reported last week that at least 40 Taiwanese travelers went missing in communist China over the past year and remain unreachable.
SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia said there were about 30 additional cases in which missing Taiwanese had been contacted by his agency. Most of those people had arranged their own “disappearances” for “personal reasons,” or because they were fleeing from the law. Luo gave the example of a 22-year-old Taiwanese man who traveled to China and “disappeared” because he was fleeing from a fraud investigation.
Luo suggested many of the 40-plus unexplained and unresolved disappearances involved young Taiwanese who traveled to China seeking job opportunities. China was making a big push to lure Taiwanese workers and entrepreneurs to the mainland before the Chinese economy turned sour during the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
The SEF chief tartly advised young Taiwanese to remember that China’s unemployment rate is stratospheric these days, especially for young people.
“Youth unemployment has risen so high that no more high-paying jobs would be left for Taiwanese,” he said. “People should have some common sense.”
Luo advised young Taiwanese to be suspicious of “highly profitable” job offers from the mainland, and cautioned his audience that the Chinese Communist government could arrest them and make them disappear at any moment, since it has nothing resembling Western or Taiwanese standards for the rule of law.
China has sidelined its effort to pull Taiwanese ashore with dubious job offers, and instead is trying to lure them with easy tourist visas known as “Taiwan Compatriot Permits.”
However, Beijing is also cracking down on anyone it views as a “Taiwan independence separatist,” a very vague charge that could get almost anyone from Taiwan tossed in jail without due process.
In fact, the “22 guidelines” published by the Chinese Communist government in June for dealing with “Taiwanese separatists” include the death penalty. Members of the U.S. Congressional Taiwan Caucus promptly condemned these guidelines as a “significant threat to peace and stability in the region.”
Shortly after the 22 guidelines were announced, the Taiwanese Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) upgraded its travel alert warning for China, Hong Kong, and Macau, and advised Taiwanese citizens to avoid traveling to Chinese territory unless absolutely necessary.
On Thursday, four employees of the Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. – a Taiwanese electronics giant better known as Foxconn in the Western world – were detained in the city of Zhegzhou, China, under circumstances the MAC described as “quite strange.”
Zhengzhou is the location of Foxconn’s largest factory for producing Apple iPhone components. The SEF said four employees of the factory may have been detained in a case involving “corruption and abuse of power by a small number of public security officials.”
The SEF warned the corruption case “has severely damaged business confidence.”
“We urge the relevant authorities across the Strait to investigate and address the matter promptly,” the SEF said.
