Taipei, April 15 (CNA) Taiwanese pro-democracy activist Lee Ming-che (李明哲), who returned to Taiwan on Friday after completing a five-year jail term in China for “subverting state power,” thanked those who worked to free him and said he felt “tightly embraced by love.”
“I am finally back in Taiwan, and I saw a haggard but excited Ching-yu through the window,” Lee said in a statement posted Friday on a Facebook page dedicated to his case, referring to his wife Lee Ching-yu (李凈瑜), who had campaigned tirelessly for his release.
“Thank you to everyone at home and abroad who have tried to rescue me over the past five years. Your concern has always been the greatest source of strength for those who suffer for their faith,” Lee said in his first public statement in five years.
Although the suffering of his family has ended, Lee said there were still many people in China whose human rights are being violated, and he hoped they would one day be freed as well.
“Freedom is earned, just as the people of Taiwan traded blood and tears for freedom, democracy and human rights during the country’s martial law era,” he said.
Though his movements are currently restricted in Taiwan because he is undergoing mandatory COVID-19 quarantine at an unspecified location, Lee said it felt “completely different” than being imprisoned in China.
“Now I am tightly embraced by love rather than besieged by fear,” he said.
Lee, who is expected to hold a press conference with his wife after completing his quarantine period, expressed his gratitude to the individuals and organizations that have helped him during his ordeal.
They included late President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), China Aid founder Bob Fu, and Yang Sen-hong (楊憲宏), founder of the Taiwan Association for China Human Rights.
Lee, 47, went missing in March 2017 after he traveled to Guangdong Province from Macau to visit friends. Ten days later, he was confirmed to have been arrested by Chinese authorities on suspicion of “harming China’s national security.”
The arrest happened amid increasingly tense relations between Taipei and Beijing less than a year after the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took power.
At the time of his arrest, Lee, who once worked for the DPP, was a staff member at Taipei’s Wenshan Community College.
He was accused of working with a Chinese national to circulate comments on social media and messaging platforms that attacked the Chinese Communist Party, China’s political system, and the Chinese government and promoted Western-style democracy.
Lee pleaded guilty during the trial and was sentenced to five years in prison, becoming the first Taiwanese citizen to be convicted of subversion of state power in China.
On Friday, a group of NGOs and human rights groups, including Amnesty International Taiwan, that had been trying to get Lee freed, urged the Chinese government to improve its human rights record and release any human rights activist who was still detained or imprisoned.
“(The group) has always believed in the innocence of Lee Ming-che. The only thing he did was make online comments voicing concerns about China’s human rights and civil society. Such acts do not constitute a crime in any normal country,” the groups said in a statement.
The group also called on the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Taiwan’s top government agency handling China policy, to investigate other incidents of Taiwanese citizens disappearing or being arbitrarily detained in China.
The MAC, meanwhile, said it will continue to assist with other similar cases involving Taiwanese being detained in China.
It also urged the Chinese government to protect the rights of Taiwanese nationals in China, which it said would be conducive to better cross-Taiwan Strait relations.
There are currently at least four other high-profile Taiwanese nationals still missing or being detained in China.
They are Shih Cheng-ping (施正屏), a retired National Taiwan Normal University associate professor, Tsai Chin-shu (蔡金樹), chairman of the South Taiwan Cross-Strait Relations Association, Lee Meng-chu (李孟居), a local government adviser in Pingtung County, and Taiwanese scholar Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽).
The four were arrested between 2018 and 2020 and accused by Beijing of spying for Taiwan’s government. They were forced to make public “confessions” on Chinese state television.
(By Shen Peng-ta and Christie Chen)
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