The Plight of Deng Liting

The refusal of Taiwan’s border officials to allow dissident writer Deng Liting to enter the sovereign territory has placed her in a highly uncertain situation with deportment back to China, from which she fled in fear for her life in July, a real possibility.

Liting, who has written a novel critical of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule and posted a video on social media about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre—which it is not legal to mention in China—left the city of Chongqing with her husband and small son after police arrested her in June, according to a Radio Free Asia report. Following her arrest, Liting says that police interrogated, bullied, and threatened her and tore her clothes right in front of her son.

After fleeing to Thailand, Liting found out that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees would take months to process her claim for refugee status. So she and her family went on to Taiwan, only to find that the authorities there would not let them past customs. The rationale? Once you let one political refugee in from China, you’re going to have a human tidal wave on your hands.

At the moment, not many people know Liting’s whereabouts. If we are to believe Radio Free Asia, Liting may have to return to China soon from the location which she is unwilling to disclose because of that very reason.

In recent months, the treatment of writers at the hands of the communist regime in Beijing has met with conspicuous silence on the part of large swaths of the political and intellectual classes of the West, especially those people and organizations who profess their devotion to creative freedom.

The death sentence meted out to Yang Hengjun, whom Chinese police arrested after he stopped off in Guangzhou on his way from the United States to his home in Australia, has barely gotten any attention from PEN America, an outfit quick to stand up for the rights of Salman Rushdie or journalists in the so-called patriarchal states of Egypt and Yemen.

But there is an additional layer of irony to the terrible plight of Deng Liting. As many people know, Taiwan has long engaged in a kind of arbitrage with the other governments of the world in an effort to get them to confer diplomatic recognition on Taiwan rather than the People’s Republic of China. They both claim to be the rightful government of China, and you cannot recognize the two of them or give both a seat at the United Nations. It’s either/or.

As it strives to position itself as a free and democratic alternative to the repressive communist PRC, one might expect Taiwan to be acutely conscious of abuses of power that mar its own history, like the massacre known as the February 28 Incident. Not to mention the treatment of writers at the hands of the Kuomintang party, which, although not in power at present, has ruled the island for most of its recent history and given Taiwan its modern political identity.

At times in the past, the Taiwanese government has had to fear domestic dissent nearly as much as CCP aggression. As Jonathan Spence reminds us in his sweeping study The Search for Modern China, Mao Zedong came close to invading the island during one flashpoint in the summer of 1950 but held off because he and others in the CCP believed there was a highly realistic prospect of an indigenous uprising on Taiwan toppling Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang, doing the communists’ work for them.

Wang Meng, an author who has courted controversy by denouncing the excesses of both the Right and the Left, describes in his influential 1980 essay “What Am I Searching For?”, which prefaces his collection The Butterfly and Other Stories, the effects that the Kuomintang’s murder of writers had on him during his formative years. He recalls the impact on a middle schooler’s mind of finding out that the Kuomintang had executed Hu Yepin, Ru Shi, Yin Fu, Li Weisen, and other members of the outlawed League of Left-Wing Writers.

This atrocity horrified the young Meng, though in his essay he is quick to balance his account with a recollection of larger-scale communist crimes, singling out Mao’s wife for criticism.

“During the ten ruinous years of the ‘cultural revolution,’ I was constantly astonished by the intensive, instinctive, even bestial, nature of Jiang Qing’s fear and loathing of writers,” Meng writes, in Rui An’s translation.

Nonetheless, the Kuomintang and the government of Taiwan should be keenly aware of the fate of novelists and journalists of past decades who failed to conform to official dogmas and asserted the right to tell the truth as they saw it, much as Deng Liting has done.

The fact that an author seeking refuge from PRC police and officials who assaulted her and tore her clothes in front of her son met with stern refusal on the part of Taiwan’s border officials, who knew full well what might happen to her and her family if they did not at least entertain her asylum request, hardly helps position the sovereign territory as the freer, more tolerant and magnanimous of the two Chinas.

Investors, diplomats, the media, and free speech advocates everywhere should not turn a deaf ear to her plight.