Taiwan owes propagandist nothing

A man who spent years fronting the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) flagship legal program on state television stepped off a connecting flight at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport this week and asked Taiwan for protection.

The National Immigration Agency declined and sent him back to Bangkok. Cheng Wanjun (程萬軍) says he is angry and disappointed. Those feelings are understandable. They are not a legal claim.

Start with the itinerary. Cheng was flying from Bangkok to Beijing. A man who believes the Chinese state is hunting him does not usually buy a ticket to its capital, and Taipei was entitled to find his danger less than self-evident.

Then the resume. Cheng presented on China Central Television’s (CCTV) Legal Lecture Hall and later edited Law and Life magazine. CCTV is an organ of the CCP’s Propaganda Department and its legal programming exists to teach a billion people that the law is whatever the CCP says it is.

Success in that industry is not available to people who step out of line. It is earned by staying in line year after year.

None of this rules out a genuine falling out. The CCP has a long tradition of discarding its most useful servants and if Cheng now sits on the wrong side of someone powerful, that is a misfortune. It does not make Taiwan obliged to repair it.

A falling out is not a reckoning. His account so far describes persecution. It does not describe repentance and the difference matters.

Compare Cheng with Ruth Wang (王夏紅), the Beijing Zion Church defense lawyer who left a transit flight on Sept. 2 with her family and received temporary humanitarian accommodation. Her offense was defending people the state wanted silenced. Her record and her risk could be read at a glance.

Cheng’s case is nearly the inverse: a record of service to the apparatus and a risk that is asserted rather than shown. Treating the two alike would not be generosity. It would erase the distinction on which asylum depends.

Taiwan has no refugee law. Since 2023, only Chinese dissident Chen Siming (陳思明) has reached safety, through Canada, without formally entering Taiwan. Everyone else was deported. Taiwan is a doorway in these cases, not a destination, and a doorway that opens for anyone who asks, with no examination of who they are, is one Beijing would learn to use. A democracy facing the region’s most aggressive intelligence apparatus should ask applicants what they did before they asked for asylum.

Cheng is seeking refuge in Canada through the Independent Chinese PEN Center. That is the right course. Canada has adjudicators and the means to investigate his past, which a transit counter at Taoyuan airport does not. Critics will say that returning him to Bangkok risks refoulement and that failing to verify a claim does not prove it false. Both points have force. Neither creates a duty to shelter a former mouthpiece on his say-so.

Taiwan’s refusal will be called cold. Perhaps it was, but until Cheng explains to someone’s satisfaction what he did before he asked for asylum, Taiwan owes him good wishes, not a bed.

Clive Hazell is a Kaohsiung-based writer and educator. A 30-year-resident of Taiwan and Japan, he writes on geopolitics, culture and East Asia.