RSS Feed
September 9th, 2017 
Awake Goy 
nsnbc : Lee Ching-yu, the wife of Taiwanese human rights activist Lee Ming-che who is being held in China and whose trial for “subversion” is set to start in Yueyang in China’s Hunan Province on September 11, asked the public in Taiwan for forgiveness if her husband admitted guilt when his trial on charges of “subversive activities” starts on Monday.
Lee Ming-yu (archive)
Lee Ming-che disappeared last March 19 after he had crossed into China from Macau. After weeks of pressure Beijing finally admitted that he had been detained on suspicion of activities designed to subvert state power. His wife, Lee Ching-yu, was planning to take a flight to China Sunday to attend his trial in Yueyang, a city in the province of Hunan.
At a news conference Saturday, she warned the public in Taiwan beforehand that if Lee made statements in court which sounded embarrassing or hard to listen to, that was part of a show set up by the Chinese government. She said she hoped the Taiwanese could forgive her husband for any such actions or statements.
Lee Ching-yu said that if she were detained or disappeared during her stay in China, Taiwan should not waste any resources in coming to her aid. She emphasized she was not heading for Hunan to challenge the Chinese authorities or to argue with them, but to watch justice being done and her husband being allowed to return home safely.
Lee Ming-che used to work for the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, but later started teaching at a community college while acting as a volunteer for a non-governmental organization. Beijing reportedly accuses him of having contacted people in China to plot against the communist government. Lee works at the Taipei City Community College and is known for having been outspoken about human rights issues in the People’s Republic of China. Lee Ming-che was traveling from Macau to Guangdong Province in March to arrange medical treatment for his mother-in-law when he disappeared.
There is a strong case for the argument that Lee “was disappeared” in violation of international law against forced disappearances and other humanitarian laws. It took the government of the People’s Republic of China ten days before Beijing caved in for mounting international pressure and acknowledged that Lee had been arrested.
At a regular news conference in Beijing Wednesday, March 29, Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Ma Xiaoguang, for the first time acknowledged that Lee had been detained, saying he was being investigated “on the suspicion of conducting activities damaging to national security.” Ma Xiaoguang did not specify what risk Lee Ming-che could have posed to the people’s republic’s “national security”.
He was showing no health problems, Ma said, following concern by his wife about high blood pressure and the possible absence of the necessary medicine. However, Beijing’s spokesman refused to answer questions from Taiwanese reporters as to Lee’s whereabouts, and he did not provide any details about what the former DPP worker had supposedly been doing.
Ma merely claimed that Taiwanese visitors to China had nothing to fear as long as they showed “normal” behavior as the country followed the rule of law. He did not specify what he meant with “normal” either or whether being outspoken about human rights issues was regarded as “not normal or rather normative behavior” in the people’s republic.
The statement prompted nsnbc editor-in-chief Christof Lehmann to ironically question what “the people’s republic” considers as “normal or normative behavior”, and if that would include “shutting up about human rights concerns, working for low wages for the benefit of the people’s republic and to die as soon as possible after retirement – all for the good of the people”.
F/AK & CH/L – nsnbc 09.09.2017
Source Article from https://nsnbc.me/2017/09/09/wife-of-taiwanese-rights-activist-lee-ming-che-detained-in-china-asks-public-for-forgiveness-if-her-husband-pleads-guilty/
Related posts:
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
