(Bloomberg) -- China released a Taiwanese fisherman it has held for more than four months, a detention that came as Beijing’s Coast Guard appeared to assert itself around Taipei’s offshore outposts.
The man surnamed Hu had safely returned to Taiwan, the government in Taipei said in a statement on Wednesday, without providing more details.
Kuomintang legislator Chen Yu-jen posted a video of herself, the fisherman and his relatives taking a ferry from the Chinese city of Xiamen to the Taiwanese islet of Kinmen a few miles away. Chen hasn’t said what her exact role in the the release was but the KMT is Beijing’s preferred negotiating partner in Taiwan.
Beijing is still holding two others who were taken into custody in July for violating a summer ban on fishing — the first time in 17 years that China stopped a Taiwanese fishing boat for that reason.
Mostly using its Coast Guard, Beijing seems to be asserting itself in new ways around Taiwan’s offshore outposts as a way to squeeze Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, who it accuses of seeking independence.
Beijing views the democratically run archipelago of 23 million people as territory that must be brought under its control someday, by force if needed. President Joe Biden has repeatedly pledged to defend Taiwan if China attacked.
The fisherman who was released Wednesday was one of two men China detained in March when their small boat got lost in fog in waters near Kinmen, Taiwan’s most populous offshore outpost.
He was an active member of Taiwan’s armed forces at the time but his family secured a discharge, a move that may have been aimed at facilitating his release. The other Taiwanese man on the boat was freed earlier.
Also Wednesday, the government department in Beijing that handles affairs related to Taiwan released a list of 10 current and former officials and political figures including Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim that it says are “stubborn Taiwan separatists.”
Beijing has hit all of them with largely symbolic sanctions in the past for alleged separatism. However, the webpage for the new list links to a law China expanded in June that it says is aimed at punishing supporters of independence for Taiwan.
While China has never said who exactly the law targets, the latest list indicates it is top political figures in Taiwan, many of them members of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
