Taiwanese Activist Says China Subjected Him to Mental Torture During Five-Year Prison Sentence
By Joyu Wang, May 10, 2022, WSJ

A Taiwanese human-rights activist accused the Beijing government of
mentally torturing him during his five-year imprisonment in mainland
China, in his first public remarks since returning to Taiwan.
Lee Ming-che, a 47-year-old employee at a community college in
Taipei who managed a charity fund for political prisoners in China,
said Tuesday that he had been coerced when he pleaded guilty to
subversion charges during a 2017 court hearing in Beijing. Lee said
that, during his five years in prison, he was deprived of interactions
with other inmates, while his every movement and word were closely
watched. He said he was forced to work long hours with little rest.

Spokespeople for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office didn’t immediately
respond to a request for comment. It earlier said that Lee’s legal
rights were protected while denouncing efforts to characterize his
detention as a human-rights case as attempts to interfere in China’s judicial system.

Lee’s case, the first in which a Taiwanese citizen was sentenced
in mainland China under a law Beijing uses to quash dissent at
home, added to an already tense relationship between the two sides.
China’s Communist Party claims Taiwan, a democratic, self-governing
island off the coast of the mainland, as part of its territory, and
has increased the pace of military actions near the island in the
past two years.

Lee went missing in March 2017 after traveling to China to visit
friends there. His disappearance prompted protests in Taipei and
Hong Kong, while raising concerns about the safety of the tens of
thousands of people from Taiwan who live and work in mainland China.
On Tuesday, Lee described being surrounded by national-security
officers after crossing the border from the Chinese territory of
Macau to Zhuhai, a city in mainland China, on March 19, 2017.
He said the officers placed a hood over his head and took him
somewhere outside Zhuhai, though he doesn’t know where he was
taken nor the exact identity of the officers who confronted him.
Lee said he was then interrogated about his past work on Chinese
human-rights issues. “That’s when I knew I was doomed,” he said.

Chinese prosecutors at the time linked Lee to online chat rooms
set up roughly a decade ago, where members often promoted Taiwanese
and Western political systems while criticizing Communist Party rule
in China. Lee said Tuesday that while he had indeed discussed
politics in an online chat room that he had helped set up, the
fact that Chinese authorities had found him guilty of state
subversion because of the chat room offered proof of Beijing’s
suppression of free speech. In his trial, during which he said he
was forced to read out a plea prepared by authorities, Lee pleaded
guilty to a charge of subverting state power. He said that authorities
had warned him that he could be sentenced to life imprisonment if
he didn’t cooperate.

Lee on Tuesday expressed contrition for his plea. “I’m sorry if
I let any Taiwanese down,” he said, adding that he was simply
doing what he needed to do to regain his freedom. “Everything I
did after my abduction was wanting to go home.” Lee also affirmed
his loyalty to Taiwan. “I never forget I’m Taiwanese,” Lee said,
adding that he felt confident enough to push back against pressure
he received to plead guilty on a separate charge of conspiring
against Beijing—a charge that he said “would implicate the entire Taiwanese government.” “I can't betray my country,” he said.

Two months after his trial, Lee was sentenced in Nov 2017 to
5 years in prison. Lee’s time in prison was difficult, he recalled.
At the prison, in a remote part of the central Chinese province of
Hunan, Mr. Lee said he worked 11 to 12 hours a day under sweatshop-
like conditions making shoes, bags and gloves. He called the prison
a “slavery factory” and described the prison food as rancid. Lee
said he was initially given only four days off each year, during
China’s Lunar New Year holiday, though he and his fellow inmates
were later able to win one day off each week after his wife, Lee
Ching-yu, campaigning on his behalf, described Mr. Lee’s living and
working conditions to the media.

Lee was also limited at first to cold showers, though he said
he believes his wife’s advocacy from afar was able to get him
hot water during the winter. Although Lee said he wasn’t
physically abused by Chinese officers, he said he was restricted
from talking to most inmates throughout his sentence, which he
described as “mental torture.” “They tried to monitor every
word and deed of mine,” he said, adding that inmates who spoke
to him were punished with a period of solitary confinement.

Ms. Lee, who appeared at her husband’s side on Tuesday, was a
vocal campaigner for his freedom, holding news conferences around
the world to drum up support, including at the U.S. Congress and
the U.K. Parliament. Ms. Lee said there were moments during
which she was tempted to compromise to win her husband back, for
instance by quietly negotiating a deal with Beijing to have him
freed, but she ultimately decided that it was important for Lee
to return to Taiwan without sacrificing his dignity.

“I only hoped for Lee Ming-che to be able to come back like a
man,” Ms. Lee said. “I could beg for a compromise and be subdued
by China, just to bring back the body of Lee Ming-che. But that
would only hurt the people I know and I love.” After over 5 years,
Lee was reunited with his wife when he returned to Taiwan last
month, though Taiwan’s pandemic measures meant they were only
able to see each other through a thick pane of glass at a
quarantine facility. “There was no such a scene where we could
hug and kiss each other,” Ms. Lee said Tuesday. “But I was looking
at him through the glass, and spoke with him on the phone from
2 p.m. that day, for 16 hours.” She added: “We talked about how
we had missed each other in the past five years.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/taiwanese-activist-says-china-subjected-him-to-mental-torture-during-five-year-prison-sentence-11652196727

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