New Taipei, April 7 (CNA) Absolute freedom of speech does not protect calls for Taiwan’s elimination, President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) said Monday at an event to remember pro-democracy movement pioneer Nylong Cheng (鄭南榕) 36 years after Cheng’s death.
Taiwan today is embattled by psychological, media and legal warfare waged by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and increasingly blatant “gray zone” activities, Lai said at a public memorial service at the Chin Pao San cemetery in New Taipei, Cheng’s final resting place.
Last year alone, 64 Taiwanese were prosecuted for spying for the CCP, quadruple that of 2021, Lai said.
“These people, funded by (Chinese) communists, acted in collaboration with China in an attempt to threaten Taiwan’s democratic and free constitutional institutions,” Lai said.
Over the past few weeks, China has also launched large-scale military exercises near Taiwan that involved its air and naval forces, trying to pressure Taiwanese into turning their backs on their homeland and abandoning freedom and democracy, Lai said.
Faced with these threats, the government will vigorously take action against anyone who works in collusion with China to advocate a military invasion of Taiwan or resort to “extreme” means to undermine democratic institutions, he said.
Similarly, the government will resolutely take action against anyone who attempts to “threaten national security and exploit freedom and diversity in Taiwan to create chaos,” Lai said.
“As president, my mission is to sustain the survival and development of this country, safeguard hard-won democracy and freedom, and ensure that this country’s sovereignty will not be absorbed or encroached upon,” he said.
“Any initiative propagating the exploitation of the Taiwanese people’s freedoms or the elimination of the Republic of China, Taiwan, is unacceptable to Taiwanese society, and absolute freedom of speech does not mean using freedom to destroy freedom,” he said.
Cheng was a trailblazer in Taiwan’s freedom of speech movement and a Taiwan independence advocate who self-immolated on April 7, 1989 after facing arrest by the then-Kuomintang administration, which had charged him with sedition over an article he had published in his magazine.
In 2016, the Taiwanese government declared April 7 Freedom of Speech Day.
► Historical documents, diary mark 36th anniversary of Nylon Cheng’s death
The freedom of speech issue has been part of the public discourse in recent weeks after Taiwan’s National Immigration Agency revoked the residence permits of three Chinese influencers who were married to Taiwanese husbands and had lived in Taiwan for years.
The government said they were ordered to leave Taiwan for advocating the military takeover of Taiwan by China in violation of the Act Governing Relations between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area.
The act says that a Chinese national “may be deported, or ordered to depart within 10 days” under circumstances including “being considered threat [sic] to the national or social stability based on sufficient facts.”
► Chinese spouse loses final appeal against deportation order
► 75 scholars criticize Lai’s populism, freedom of speech erosion
