Taipei, April 10 The wife of a Taiwanese human rights activist arrested in China could not travel to Beijing on Monday after her entry permit into the country was revoked. Lee Ching-yu, whose husband Lee Ming-che has been detained since March 19 at an undisclosed location in China for alleged acts against national security, told the media at Taipei airport that she will not allow herself to be manipulated, Efe news reported.

Start the conversation, or Read more at India.com. </s> The wife of a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist detained in China said Monday that she was prevented from flying to the mainland to seek a visit with her husband, whose case has inflamed tensions between the sides that have already sunk to their lowest level in years. Lee Ching-yu said airline staff told her when she tried to check in for her flight that Beijing authorities had canceled her Chinese-issued travel permit.

Start the conversation, or Read more at Powhatan Today. </s> TAIPEI - China’s detention of a Taiwanese political activist on suspicion of endangering national security is causing a new rift in already strained relations between Taipei and Beijing.



China has held Lee Ming-che for 23 days, saying he is suspected of endangering state security. On Monday, his wife found out that China had revoked her travel permit,shortly before taking a flight to Beijing, where she planned to pursue information on Lee’s detention.



The case is straining government-to-government relations already hobbled by a 70-year-old sovereignty dispute and a freeze in formal dialogue over the past year, Taiwan officials and scholars say.



“We urge the mainland Chinese side to look at this issue correctly and respond immediately including with a speedy disclosure of the real reasons and location of detention as well as let family visit as soon as possible to avoid complicating matters and even causing impacts that neither side wants to see,” Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said in a statement Monday.

The extent of any impact on relations hinges on how long China holds Lee, a 42-year-old philosophy scholar and former worker with Taiwan’s ruling party, and what they eventually charge him with, scholars in Taiwan say.

“It’s already been a few days, so many days, and there’s still no clear word [on the Lee case], said Huang Kwei-bo, associate diplomacy professor at National Chengchi University in Taipei. “Taiwanese society, from the point of view of Taiwan’s rule of law, everyone will find this to be very strange.”



The two sides have been separately ruled since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war of the 1940s and fled to Taiwan. China still claims sovereignty over Taiwan, but government polls in Taiwan show most people prefer their autonomy.

Taiwan and China

Impact on Chinese relations



Whether Lee’s case dents broader China-Taiwan relations depends on whether Beijing offers more information and how long that takes, said Lee Li-chen, deputy secretary general of the Straits Exchange Foundation, an agency in Taipei that handles consular-style matters with China.



“The public hopes that safety can be guaranteed in China. If someone like Lee can be held for investigation, then they hope they can quickly know for what reason he has been locked up and where he’s locked up as well as hoping family can visit,” she said.

“So in terms of the development of cross-Strait [China-Taiwan] relations, we’re still observing how the mainland China side handles follow-up to the Lee Ming-che case," Lee Li-chen said.



Between one and three million Taiwanese live in China, with many of them there to run factories.



Under current Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, the two sides have not agreed on how to regard each other politically, stopping dialogue since she took office in May.

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast c Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast combat support ship during her trip at a navy base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 21, 2017. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen visits Panshi fast combat support ship during her trip at a navy base in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, March 21, 2017.

China has passed its aircraft carrier around the island 160 kilometers away, persuaded a diplomatic ally to cut ties with Taiwan and scaled back tourism to express its disapproval, analysts in Taipei believe.



Lee Ming-che disappeared March 19 after a flight from Taipei to the Chinese territory of Macau and before crossing a land border into mainland China where a friend was waiting, colleagues in Taipei say. They say he was on his way to Guangzhou to see friends and get Chinese medicine for his mother in-law.



China’s Taiwan Affairs Office said on March 29 that Lee was being questioned on suspicion he took part in activities that endangered state security.



Lee had visited China once a year over the past decade, sometimes to help Chinese lawyers in human rights cases, a fellow human rights worker in Taipei said. Police in China have “targeted” 248 Chinese human rights lawyers and activists in a crackdown since July 2015, London-based advocacy group Amnesty International says.



He had also used social media to reach about 100 people in China for discussions about democracy and human rights in Taiwan, said Cheng Hsiu-chuan, president of Lee’s Taipei employer, Wenshan Community College.



Some Taiwanese believe China is detaining the activist to answer Taiwan’s arrest in early March of a mainland Chinese business administration student who was suspected of spying. Others find “no cause” to get upset so far, said Nathan Liu, international affairs and diplomacy professor at Ming Chuan University in Taiwan.



“I don’t see too much sympathetic reaction for this case,” Liu said. “We don’t really know what happened and nothing like he got tortured or some unjust call.”



“Taiwanese people may feel confused by the case. They consider democracy to be “normal” and see China’s legal treatment of pro-democracy activism in the Communist country as a “grey area,” Huang said.



In Taiwan, Lee worked as a college program manager and volunteered for a league of Taiwan human rights groups gathering information on international laws to make sure Taiwan was complying. </s> The wife of a Taiwanese pro-democracy activist detained in China said Monday that she was prevented from flying to the mainland to seek a visit with her husband, whose case has inflamed tensions between the sides that have already sunk to their lowest level in years.

Lee Ching-yu said airline staff told her when she tried to check in for her flight that Beijing authorities had canceled her Chinese-issued travel permit. Li was hoping to fly to China to demand information about her husband, Lee Ming-che, who has not been heard from since March 19.

A Chinese official said last week that Lee was under investigation on suspicion of endangering Chinese national security and was in "good physical condition," but offered no additional information. Lee Ching-yu says her husband suffers from hypertension and has asked that medication be provided to him.

Lee, a college employee who used the WeChat social media platform to discuss China-Taiwan relations, is the first Taiwanese activist in years to be held by China on security charges. His colleagues said his account on WeChat — a mainland China-based service used broadly in the Chinese-speaking world — had been shut down by Chinese authorities in mid-2016, suggesting he had attracted government attention.

Lee, 42, formerly worked for the Democratic Progressive Party, which has advocated for Taiwan's formal independence. He was due to meet a friend in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on March 19 but never arrived.

China cut off its already limited contacts with Taiwan's government in June, five months after the DPP's Tsai Ing-wen was elected president. Since then, China has been seen as further restricting the island's already limited diplomatic breathing space while bringing economic pressure to bear.

Trailed by a scrum of supporters and media, Lee Ching-yu was turned away at the check-in counter by an Air China employee who said the airline had been informed by Beijing that her permit to visit the mainland had been voided, without providing details. China regards Taiwan as part of its territory and requires the island's residents to use a document called a Taiwan Compatriots Pass rather than their passport when traveling to the mainland.

"I wonder why China needs to stop me, a defenseless woman, from visiting," Li told reporters at the airport.

Monday's drama raises the stakes in a case already complicated by the absence of formal cross-strait diplomatic channels. The Taiwanese government department responsible for relations with China says its requests for information about Lee have largely gone ignored.

Lee Ching-yu said Sunday that a middleman who claimed to have Chinese government contacts sought to persuade her not to make the trip, saying that her husband would be released soon if she acted in an "obedient and quietly cooperative" manner. If not, Lee said, the middleman suggested that Chinese state television would air a confession extracted from her husband.

Taiwanese media on Monday disclosed the middleman's identity as former Taiwanese intelligence officer Lee Chun-min, who told the press that he would no longer work on the case.

National security crimes in China are broadly defined and have a range of penalties. Authorities usually release little or no information on the specific allegations, citing the need to protect state secrets.

Powers of the security services in dealing with foreign groups and their Chinese partners were strongly enhanced under a law that took effect in January, leading to concerns about further prosecutions and restrictions on civil society.

In recent years, China's state security apparatus has detained foreign activists, domestic lawyers and other political elements it considers hostile and extracted and aired video confessions as proof that they were working to undermine China's national security. In several instances, the detainees recanted their confessions upon their release. </s> A Chinese woman carrying multiple cellphones and thumb drives bearing malware was arrested on Saturday at Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida while the president was staying there, court documents revealed Tuesday.

An arrest document in the federal district court of Palm Beach, Florida says Zhang Yujing tried to gain entry into Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, first claiming she was a member headed to the pool and then claiming to be attending a non-existent Chinese-American event.

US press accounts said she had "Chinese passports" but the court document stated they were for "Republic of China," the official name of Taiwan, as opposed to "People's Republic of China," the mainland.

Secret Service agents at the scene inspected her found four cellphones, a laptop computer, an external hard drive and a thumb drive that "contained malicious software", according to the document.

She had no swimsuit, the document said, despite her initial claim to be headed for a swim.

Zhang was arrested and charged with making false statements to federal officers and knowingly entering a restricted building -- which Mar-a-Lago is while Trump is in residence. </s> WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A former Central Intelligence Agency officer was arrested at a U.S. airport on Monday night in connection with charges that he illegally retained highly classified information, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a U.S. citizen who now lives in Hong Kong, used to maintain a top secret clearance and began working for the CIA in 1994.

The Justice Department said FBI agents searched his hotel rooms in 2012, during trips to Virginia and Hawaii. They discovered he had two small books containing handwritten information on details such as the true names and numbers of spy recruits and covert CIA employees.

He was arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. But Lee made his first court appearance on Tuesday before a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn. The judge ordered Lee held without bail.

A federal public defender who represented Lee at the hearing declined to comment.

An affidavit filed by an FBI agent showed that Lee, 53, served in the U.S. Army from 1982 through 1986 and worked for the CIA from 1994 through 2007.

The FBI agent wrote that Lee and his family left Hong Kong in August 2012 to travel to northern Virginia. Along the way, they stayed in hotels where the FBI found the books.

The books were discovered inside Lee’s luggage, sealed in a small clear plastic travel pack.

The handwritten information inside varied in terms of classification, but the agent said at least one page contained top secret information, “the disclosure of which could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States”.

The agent also said that classified cables Lee wrote while he was a case officer describing his interactions with CIA assets were reflected in the two books.

Lee was interviewed by the FBI five separate times in 2013 and never disclosed he had the books. He also met former CIA colleagues around that time without returning the materials to the government, the Justice Department said.

Hong Kong media said Lee worked at Christie’s auction house in the Asian financial hub. A spokeswoman for the firm confirmed on Thursday it had suspended a Hong Kong employee pending a criminal investigation.

“The allegations significantly pre-date his employment with the company,” she said, adding that the role he had for the last 20 months focused on physical security for facilities and staff.

The role was not linked to data security or IT functions at the company, she said, declining to provide further information. </s> WASHINGTON (AFP, NYTIMES) - Washington on Tuesday (July 11) invited cancer-stricken Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo to come to the United States for medical treatment, renewing its call for Beijing to free him.

The next day, China's state-backed Global Times newspaper slammed the calls by Western forces, branding them "a political charade".

"Western forces are not persuasive in reasoning. What they care about is not Liu's treatment, but transferring him abroad. This is a political charade," it said.

The op-edalso reiterated that the calls for Mr Liu to be allowed to go abroad were an interference of China's domestic affairs.

US State Department spokesman Heather Nauert said on Tuesday that the US continues to call on the Chinese authorities to grant Mr Liu full parole and also for the release of his wife, Madam Liu Xia.

"We continue to call on China to release him so that he can receive medical treatment wherever he desires. If it's in the United States, I think we would certainly welcome that," she said.

Ms Nauert said Washington was pleased that US and German medical experts have been able to visit the terminally-ill cancer patient.

"The State Department was involved in helping to get a US doctor... to China to be able to take a look at him," she said. "There was also a German doctor that was in attendance, too."

Ms Nauert added that Washington is worried not only about the welfare of Mr Liu, 61, but of other dissidents held by China.

"The State Department remains deeply concerned about the continued detention of at least seven defence lawyers and rights defenders, and reports of their alleged torture and denial of access to independent legal counsel," she said.

"We urge the Chinese authorities to immediately release those still in detention and drop the charges."

Mr Liu's heath has deteriorated since authorities revealed last month (June) that he had been transferred from prison to a hospital due to late-stage liver cancer.

But Chinese officials have ignored calls by international human rights groups, Western governments and local activists to grant the prominent democracy advocate's wish to be treated abroad.

Mr Liu has an abdominal infection, organ dysfunction and he went into septic shock, the hospital said in a statement on its website.

He is undergoing kidney dialysis, and is getting anti-infection and organ function support therapy.

On Wednesday, an op-ed in Global Times said the core of the issue is that Mr Liu is a cancer patient and a convicted criminal under China's law.

"Chinese prison authorities are obliged to provide Liu with the best treatment they can, while retaining the responsibility to supervise Liu in accordance with the law," it said.

"Foreign governments and institutes can give medical advice, but they must respect the final decision by China's prison authorities and medics."

On Monday (July 10), a spokesman for China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr Geng Shuang, denounced calls for Mr Liu to be freed to go abroad as "meddling" by foreigners, even though the two foreign doctors, who were invited by the government to examine Mr Liu said that he could travel and that their hospitals would treat him.

Mr Liu was arrested in 2008 after co-writing Charter 08, a bold petition that called for the protection of basic human rights and reform of China's one-party Communist system.

He was sentenced to 11 years in prison in December 2009 for "subversion".

At the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo in 2010, he was represented by an empty chair. </s> US authorities have arrested a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer accused of disclosing top secret information to China. The man could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison if convicted.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee was detained Monday night after landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. On Tuesday, the former CIA employee was "charged with unlawful retention of national defense information" by the Eastern District Court of New York. The judge ordered that Lee be held without bail.

US federal authorities accuse Lee of violating the terms of his top secret clearance and conditions of non-disclosure agreements he had signed with the agency he worked for from 1994 to 2007. Lee's disclosures reportedly led to a crackdown on the CIA's informants in China starting in 2010, the New York Times reported citing several former intelligence officials. The 53-year-old was at the center of a mole hunt for years.

Court documents reveal that after settling in Hong Kong with his family after leaving the agency, the accused returned to the US in August 2012 to live in northern Virginia. The FBI took note of Lee's return and placed him under investigation, searching his hotel rooms in Hawaii and Virginia during his travels back and forth between Hong Kong and the United States.

"During each of the hotel stays, FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense," the DOJ said in a statement. "Specifically, agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities."

Last year, a NYT investigation revealed that Beijing either killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 CIA sources from 2010 to 2012 following a massive intelligence breach at the agency. Initially, the CIA thought the Chinese could have hacked the Agency's communications system. However, the investigation ultimately honed in on the possibility of an internal leak, possibly by a former CIA analyst who worked in the China division. At the time, the newspaper said, there was not enough evidence to arrest the suspected mole. Whether or not Lee is responsible for exposing CIA operatives in China has not yet been announced. </s> Meng Wanzhou was detained at the request of the U.S. during a layover at the Vancouver airport

In this courtroom sketch, Meng Wanzhou, left, the chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies speaks to her lawyer David Martin during a bail hearing at B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver, on Monday, December 10, 2018. (Jane Wolsak/The Canadian Press)

President Donald Trump says he would consider intervening in the Justice Department’s case against a top Chinese executive if it would be in the interest of U.S. national security and help forge a trade deal with China.

Trump told Reuters in an interview Tuesday at the White House that if he thinks it would be good for what will “certainly be the largest trade deal ever made” he would intervene if necessary.

A Canadian court granted bail on Tuesday to the top executive of Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. She was arrested at the United States’ request in a case that has set off a diplomatic furor among the three countries and complicated high-stakes U.S.-China trade talks.

A Canadian judge is setting a string of conditions on a top Chinese executive facing possible extradition to the U.S. while releasing her on $10 million Canadian-dollar bail.

Meng Wanzhou is required her to wear an ankle bracelet, surrender her passports, stay in Vancouver and its suburbs and confine herself to one of her two Vancouver homes from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Justice William Ehrcke of the Supreme Court of British Columbia says he is satisfied Meng, a well-educated businesswomen with letters of reference, does not pose a flight risk.

Meng is the chief financial officer of telecommunications giant Huawei and also the daughter of its founder. She was detained at the request of the U.S. during a layover at the Vancouver airport on Dec. 1 — the same day that Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping of China agreed to a 90-day cease-fire in a trade dispute that threatens to disrupt global commerce.

READ MORE: Canada-China relations turn icy over arrest of Chinese exec

The U.S. has accused Huawei of using a Hong Kong shell company to sell equipment in Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. It also says that Meng and Huawei misled banks about the company’s business dealings in Iran.

On Monday, China detained a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing in apparent retaliation.

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People's Republic of China detains Taiwanese political activist Lee Ming-che on suspicion of endangering national security and revokes his wife's travel permit.