China’s Rhetoric Becomes Dangerously Real for Taiwanese

Calls to report “die-hard” Taiwanese secessionists, a hotline to report them, and punishments that could include the death penalty for “ringleaders”: Beijing’s usual anti-Taiwan rhetoric is becoming dangerously real.

The democratically governed island has grown accustomed to China’s demands. Even planes and ships testing its defenses have become a routine provocation. But recent moves to criminalize support for it are unnerving Taiwanese living and working in China, and those at home.

“I am currently planning to speed up my departure,” said a Taiwanese businesswoman living in China, shortly after the Supreme Court introduced changes allowing life sentences and even the death penalty for those convicted of advocating Taiwan independence.

“I don’t think this is making a mountain out of a hill. The line is very blurry now,” says Prof. Yu Jie, a legal scholar at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office was quick to reassure Taiwan’s 23 million people that it was not targeting them, but an “extremely small number of hard-line independence activists.” The “vast majority of Taiwanese compatriots have nothing to fear,” the office said.

But wary Taiwanese say they don’t want to test that claim. The BBC spoke to several Taiwanese living and working in China who said they were planning to leave soon or had already left. Few were willing to be interviewed on the record; none wanted to be named.

“Any statement you make now could be misinterpreted and you could be reported. Even before this new law, China was already encouraging people to report others,” the businesswoman said.

The matter was made official last week, when Chinese authorities launched a website identifying Taiwanese public figures considered “die-hard” separatists. The site included an email address where people could send “leads and crimes” about those named, or anyone else they suspected.

Scholars believe Beijing hopes to emulate the success of Hong Kong’s national security laws, which the body said were necessary for stability but which crushed the city’s pro-democracy movement, as former lawmakers, activists and ordinary citizens critical of the government were jailed under them.

By making pro-Taiwanese sentiment a national security issue, Beijing hopes to “cut the movement’s ties with the outside world and divide Taiwanese society into those who support Taiwan independence and those who do not,” says Professor Chen, a legal scholar at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica.

He argues that the Supreme Court’s directives will almost certainly lead to prosecution of some Taiwanese living in China.

“This advisory has been sent to all levels of law enforcement across the country. So this is a way of saying to them: we want to see more cases like this prosecuted, so go and find one.”

“We need to be even more cautious,” said a Taiwanese man living in Macau. He said he had always been prepared for threats, but the new legal guidelines had caused his friends to “express concern” about his future in the Chinese city.

“In recent years, patriotic education has become more prevalent in Macau, with more assertive statements on Taiwan creating a more tense atmosphere than in pre-pandemic times,” he added.

Taiwan, which has powerful allies in the United States, the European Union and Japan, rejects Beijing’s plans for “reunification”, but fears are growing that Chinese President Xi Jinping has rushed the pace of his takeover of the island, a stated goal of the Chinese Communist Party.

For more than 30 years, Taiwanese companies, including iPhone maker Foxconn, advanced chip giant TSMC and electronics giant Acer, have played a key role in China’s growth. Prosperity has also brought Taiwanese across the strait in search of jobs and brighter prospects.

“I loved Shanghai when I first moved there. It seemed so much bigger, more exciting, more cosmopolitan than Taipei,” says Zoe Chu*. She has spent more than a decade in Shanghai managing in-demand foreign musicians for clubs and venues in cities across China.

It was the mid-2000s, when China was booming, attracting money and people from all over the world. Shanghai was the heart of it all: bigger, shinier, and trendier than any other Chinese city.

“My friends in Shanghai were dismissive of Beijing. They called it the big village of the north,” Ms. Chu recalls. “Shanghai was the place to be. It had the best restaurants, the best nightclubs, the coolest people. I felt like such a country girl, but I learned quickly.”

By the end of that decade, in 2009, more than 400,000 Taiwanese lived in China. By 2022, that number had plummeted to 177,000, according to official Taiwan data.

“China has changed,” says Ms. Chu, who left Shanghai in 2019. She now works for a medical company in Taipei and has no plans to return.

“I’m Taiwanese,” he explains. “It’s not safe for us there anymore.”

The Taiwanese exodus was driven by the same causes that drove huge numbers of foreigners to leave China: a slow economy, growing hostility between Beijing and Washington and, above all, the sudden and radical lockdowns during the Covid pandemic.

But Taiwanese in China are also worried because the government does not consider them “foreigners,” making them particularly vulnerable to state repression.

Senior Taiwanese officials told the BBC that 15 Taiwanese citizens are currently detained in China for various alleged crimes, “including violations of the anti-secession law”.

In 2019, China Taiwanese businessman jailed for espionage after being caught taking pictures of police officers in Shenzhen, a charge he denied. He was only released last year. In April 2023, China confirmed that it had Taiwanese publisher arrested for “endangering national security.” He remains in custody.

Amy Hsu*, who used to live and work in China, says she is now afraid to even go there because of her job. After returning to Taiwan, she started volunteering at an NGO that helped people who had fled Hong Kong to settle in Taiwan.

“It’s definitely more dangerous for me now,” he says. “In 2018, they started using surveillance cameras to ticket people who were crossing the street carelessly, and the system could identify your face and send the ticket directly to your address.”

She says the extent of the surveillance worries her and fears it could be used to prosecute visitors, particularly those on a watchlist of potential offenders.

“Oh, I’m definitely on the list. I’m a hard-core pro-independence guy. [guy] with a lot of ideas,” smiles Robert Tsao, a 77-year-old tech billionaire and founder of one of Taiwan’s largest chipmakers, United Micro-electronics Corporation (UMC).

Mr. Tsao was born in Beijing, but today he supports Taiwan independence and avoids not only China, but also Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand and even Singapore.

Mr. Tsao hasn’t always been hostile to China. He was one of the first Taiwanese investors to set up advanced chip factories in China. But he says the crackdown in Hong Kong has changed his mind: “It used to be so free and vibrant, and now it’s gone. And they want to do the same to us here.”

“This new ruling is actually helping people like me,” he says. He believes it will backfire, increasing the Taiwanese people’s resolve to resist China.

“They say the new law will only affect a few hardline independence supporters like me, but many Taiwanese support independence or the status quo. [keep things as they are]which is the same thing, so we all became criminals.”

* Names have been changed at the request of the collaborators