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Mainland dissidents test Taipei's
mettle
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Camping in a Taiwan police station
might not sound like fun, but for Xu Bo, a native of
Guizhou in mainland China, it is preferable to a labor
camp in his homeland.
Xu has already been in his
makeshift accommodation for a month; how much longer he
will spend is anybody's guess. He is the latest victim
in a cruelly ironic miscalculation that, having fallen
afoul of the authorities at home, he has fled to an
unofficial country that is supposed to be exactly the
model of respect for democratic freedoms that his
homeland is not.
Xu's problems at home revolve
around a 30,000-word book about the crackdown on the
1989 Tiananmen democracy movement he wrote in 1998 that,
as the title, Red Fascist, might suggest, is
somewhat critical.
When another Xu, Xu Wenli,
the founder of the Chinese Democratic Party, read the
book after his 1998 arrest, he advised Xu Bo to flee
abroad. Xu Bo arrived in South Korea in the autumn of
1999 and claimed political asylum. But his problems were
only beginning.
It took South Korean authorities
two years to decide to reject his application, during
which time he was labeled an "anti-establishment
activist" and routinely harassed by South Korea's
security services.
In September 2001 Xu's
application for asylum was turned down by the South
Korean Ministry of Justice. Xu then obtained refugee
status from the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR), which asked the Korean government not
to deport him back to China.
Xu was told that if
he wanted to remain in South Korea he had to stop
activities promoting democracy in China. After he
expressed his unwillingness to be gagged, it became
increasingly obvious to him that it was only a matter of
time before Seoul, to maintain good relations with
Beijing, thumbed its nose at UNHCR and send him back to
China. So in January, using a false passport, he took a
plane for Bangkok that stopped over in Taipei, where on
arrival he asked the Taiwanese authorities for asylum.
If South Korea seemed less than welcoming,
Taiwan's reaction has been even more chilly. Xu barely
escaped being put on a return flight to Seoul
immediately after his arrival on January 27 and has been
in detention in the office of the airport police ever
since.
At first the Taiwanese authorities simply
denied that Xu was who he said he was. Then he was saved
by Wei Jingsheng, perhaps the only Chinese dissident of
international renown and who now lives in exile in the
United States, who vouched for Xu.
Taiwan's
problem with Xu is ostensibly that it has no asylum law.
Xu cannot claim asylum, therefore, because what he is
claiming does not exist in Taiwanese law.
Xu
isn't the first Chinese dissident to be caught out this
way. Last October, Tang Yuanjun, another alumnus of the
China Democratic Party, made a dramatic bid for freedom
by swimming the three kilometers between China's Fujian
coast and the Taiwanese outpost of Kinmen island.
Tang also claimed political asylum and, like Xu,
was then appalled to find that to the Taiwan authorities
he was just another illegal immigrant from the mainland.
It took the efforts of the Taiwan Association for Human
Rights and another exiled Chinese dissident, Tiananmen
student leader Wang Dan, to get Taipei to take Tang's
case seriously.
Tang's asylum claim met the same
response as Xu's, that Taiwan doesn't recognize the
legal status of asylum. But Tang, perhaps because he had
better "provenance" as a dissident - he had, unlike Xu,
already done jail time in China - met with more vigorous
support from human-rights groups, which attacked the
Taiwan government's position on moral, political and
legal grounds.
The moral argument is perhaps the
most obvious: Taiwan's current government is formed by
the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which itself was
formed by Taiwanese dissidents in the dark days of
martial law. As a result, both the government and the
ruling party are packed with people who have spent time
in political exile, most notably the current vice
president, Annette Lu.
In its more dictatorial
days, the previous Kuomintang government was almost a
carbon copy of its rival across the Taiwan Strait,
jailing dissidents, then releasing them to go abroad and
blacklisting their return.
Ironically, so many
of the DPP hierarchy were blacklisted that there has
been tension in the party between those who spent time
in exile and those who did not as to which group has the
more "authentic" dissident credentials.
Not
surprisingly, human-rights campaigners such as the
Taiwan Association for Human Rights find it monstrously
hypocritical of a government and party, so many members
of which have benefited from other countries' good
graces on the issue of asylum, which denies those rights
to dissidents from China. It is grotesque, say critics,
that Taiwan presents itself as a bastion of hope for
repressed Chinese - as long as they don't try to come to
Taiwan.
This meshes with the political argument
for asylum, namely that Taiwan seeks recognition in the
international community based not only on its economic
stature but also on its achievements in democratization
and human rights, achievements that have made it the
poster child for "third wave" democracies. President
Chen Shui-bian has on several occasions stressed that he
wants to promote the democratization of the Asia-Pacific
region. Last year he said he sought to "assist and
promote China's democratization in order to show the
superiority and independence of Taiwanese democracy". It
ill becomes a country that looks to the worthiness of
its human-rights record to break China's diplomatic
blockade to play fast and loose with the internationally
recognized concept of asylum.
But it is the
legal argument on asylum that is perhaps the most
interesting given Taiwan's uncertain international
status. Some lawyers have argued that it doesn't matter
whether Taiwan has legislation specifically dealing with
asylum or not, it is still obliged by international law,
under the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the
Status of Refugees, to uphold the principle of
"non-refoulement", basically not returning refugees to a
country where they are likely to suffer persecution or
torture. If Taiwan wants to be taken seriously as an
independent sovereignty, the argument goes, then it
should itself take seriously the obligations that go
with that status.
The United States solved
Taiwan's embarrassment over Tang by granting him asylum.
It has yet to be so generous with Xu. But human-rights
activists as well as some legislators are appalled that
asylum-seeking Chinese dissidents are seen as an
embarrassment at tall. Should Taiwan not be embracing
these people? After all, they argue, Taiwan's best hope
of avoiding coerced reunification with China is
political liberalization in Beijing; surely Taiwan
should be doing everything it can to bring that about,
including supporting pro-democracy dissidents.
The government's response to such arguments has
been chilly. And, as a result, it has been accused of
moral cowardice in the face of Taiwan's huge economic
involvement with the mainland. Taiwan, according to this
argument, will bend over backward to appease Beijing on
anything other than its own sovereignty for the safety
of its business interests.
But a
national-security advisor, speaking to this reporter on
condition of anonymity, said this was a vast
oversimplification of a complicated issue. For a start,
he said, Chinese democracy activists tend to be a lot
less democratic when it comes to the issue of Taiwan
independence. "Reunification is probably the one issue
where those in power in Beijing actually have
overwhelming popular support," he said.
He also
pointed out that liberalization of Taiwan's asylum
policy could lead to what he called a "European problem"
of economic migrants claiming refugee status. "In the
last 10 years we have sent back 40,000 illegal
immigrants from China. They came here solely to make
money, but how many of those would claim a 'well-founded
fear of persecution' if they thought it might do them
any good?"
And while not willing to speak about
Xu Bo's case, he even showed some sympathy for the South
Koreans. "Everybody thinks our attitude is about not
interfering with cross-Strait business. That isn't true.
They say that about the Koreans, who also have a big
economic relationship with China. But South Korea has
other reasons to try to get along with China, namely
North Korea. So, for that matter, does Japan."
But he admitted that Taiwan wasn't eager to
build up its relations with China's democracy movement.
"Then the Chinese can arrest these people and call them
Taiwan spies," he said. "Trouble for them, trouble for
us."
He also admitted that practical concerns
took their toll on the welcome in the region for Chinese
dissidents. "Nobody wants to quarrel with China but if
they do, they want it to be about their own national
interests, not a bunch of Chinese who are only
interested in China."
(©2003 Asia Times Online
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