Red Dragnet｜Punched for Speaking Out: Akio Yaita Says China Is Sowing Fear in Taiwan

Two weeks after a stranger followed him into a Taichung hotel lobby and punched him in the face, Akio Yaita (矢板明夫) has no interest in discussing whether he will now choose his words more carefully.

"Staying calm is the most effective punch we can throw back," the commentator told Storm Media. He reads the violence as evidence of weakness rather than strength. With China's economy struggling and its domestic record poor, he argued, the leadership has become acutely sensitive to criticism — "what it fears most right now is other people criticizing it, commenting on it."

Yaita, executive director of the Taipei-based Indo-Pacific Strategy Think Tank and former Taipei bureau chief of Japan's Sankei Shimbun, was assaulted on July 6 after delivering a speech on cross-strait relations and Indo-Pacific security. Police arrested a 33-year-old suspect at Taichung International Airport the same afternoon as he attempted to board a flight to Busan.

He places his own case beside another image from the same month: Hong Kong national security officers leading a bookshop employee away in handcuffs.

"Arresting that bookshop clerk has no judicial meaning whatsoever, and it is negative for China's national image," he said. "But they need the picture. They need to walk the bookshop staff out in handcuffs so that everyone is afraid. What it really wants is to plant a seed of terror in everyone's heart."

After the attack, the Mainland Affairs Council said it strongly suspected the assault was the first case of transnational repression directed at Taiwan since Beijing's Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress took effect on July 1. Alongside strong condemnation and a formal protest, the council immediately activated its counter-transnational-repression working platform — the cross-agency mechanism through which prosecutors, the National Police Agency, the aviation police and the National Immigration Agency identified the suspect and intercepted him at the boarding gate.

How Taipei reads the law itself was set out separately on July 14, when MAC Deputy Minister Shen Yu-chung (沈有忠) told a forum on the law's implications for cross-strait exchanges that it should not be treated as an internal administrative measure, but as the legalisation, institutionalisation and even normalisation of the long-arm jurisdiction and transnational repression Beijing has been building toward Taiwan in recent years. The statute is vaguely drafted and extraterritorial in effect, Shen said, and it has already drawn serious concern from Japan, the United States, Canada and the European Parliament.

The law was passed by the China's National People's Congress on March 12 and runs to seven chapters and 65 articles, reaching into education, language, publishing, the internet, commerce and religion, with provisions addressing Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities. Article 63 states that organisations and individuals outside China that act to damage ethnic unity or create ethnic division will be held legally responsible.

Taichung police say the only person arrested so far is the suspect, identified in court filings as Liao Gangfa (廖港發), and that investigators are still working to establish whether anyone in Taiwan assisted him. According to police, Liao was born in Guangdong and entered on Hong Kong travel documents on July 2, changed hotels several times, spent the weekend familiarizing himself with the venue's lobby and exits, and was identified at the boarding gate partly by a tattoo on his hand.

The triad dimension comes from Mirror Media, which reported that Liao belongs to Wo Shing Wo (和勝和) and that the operation was directed from outside Taiwan by a triad figure surnamed Chan, who allegedly paid HK$50,000 and issued instructions to a seven-man group over WhatsApp. Six of them travelled to Taiwan to handle transport, accommodation, reconnaissance and lookout duties, the magazine reported, with four departing the day before the attack. Storm Media has not independently verified those details.

For Yaita, the arrest is the point. "The luckiest thing about this case in Taiwan is that the attacker was caught," he said. "Once you catch someone, you can get at the truth — at least everyone understands that this was organised and planned."

Wo Shing Wo, one of Hong Kong's largest triad societies, is best known internationally for the Yuen Long attack of July 21, 2019, when men in white assaulted commuters and protesters indiscriminately, injuring 45. Hong Kong police arrested 61 people; a substantial number were reported to have Wo Shing Wo connections.

Yaita's shorthand for the new statute is deliberately absurd. "Ordinary law only has effect within the territory where sovereignty is exercised," he said. "This one says: whether you are inside China or outside it, in Taiwan or in Japan, even if you go to the moon, to any corner of the universe — if you criticise the Communist Party, they will come for you."

The enforcement space has expanded, he said, but enforcement itself is expensive. That is why he reads the attack as demonstrative rather than operational: "It needs a few examples to tell everyone that even though you are abroad, if you criticize me you will be punished. I think that message is extremely strong."

He also thinks the law's sharpest effect falls on people who never appear in any indictment. "If you are someone who often goes to China — to do business, to study, to travel — you no longer dare criticize China, because you don't know when something you said was recorded," he said. "So after this law, perhaps half the people living in Taiwan have lost their freedom of expression, and half still have it. And the ones who lost it lost it because they frightened themselves."

That is also why he defends the terminology. Some commentators in Taiwan object to "transnational repression" on the grounds that Taiwan is not under Chinese jurisdiction, and prefer "transnational violence."

"Repression implies public power behind it," Yaita said. "Two people getting into a fight cannot be called repression. If you call it transnational violence, then it may simply be that Wo Shing Wo did this over a private grudge. But if state power is hidden behind it, directing it, then it is transnational repression."

Asked why the violence stopped at a punch, Yaita pointed to an older case. The 1984 killing of the writer Henry Liu in California, ordered from Taipei during the martial law era, produced exactly the outcome an authoritarian government does not want: American fury and worldwide condemnation of the Kuomintang.

"The point is to manufacture fear, not to provoke anger," he said. "If they act too heavily, it turns into anger. So they use minor offences, the lowest possible cost, to try to achieve a maximum effect."

The physical assault, he added, was only the first stage. "After I was beaten, a group of Beijing's fellow travellers jumped in and kept spreading rumours and smearing me — an attack aimed at destroying my character." None of it, he noted, addressed the assault itself; instead it worked to establish that he is not an important figure, that his problem with China is a personal grudge, that he is not taken seriously in Japan. His university admissions record was dug up.

"The purpose is to get Taiwanese society to stop caring about this," he said. "But I think Taiwanese society should care. Anyone could become the victim."

Carmen Lau, a former Hong Kong district councillor now living in exile in Britain under a HK$1 million national security bounty, is sceptical that the law changes Beijing's behaviour so much as its paperwork. Its content, she said, is close to Hong Kong's national security legislation and Article 23 ordinance, extraterritorial jurisdiction included. "For the Hong Kong community, honestly, it makes little difference," she said. "It institutionalises what they are already doing."

The more consequential audience, in her reading, is foreign. The law tells Beijing's partners: "I have already legislated, so now you have to cooperate with me" — cover for governments to align with Chinese requests more openly.

She also flags a difference in register that she thinks is doing real work. National security is a politically legible frame anywhere; ethnic unity is not. "Countries where national or ethnic sentiment runs high won't see it as a political statute," she said, calling it the same vocabulary Beijing deploys at the United Nations, where economic and cultural language is used to dilute human rights obligations. In her current research on Chinese influence in Latin America, she said, some governments aligned with Beijing have already begun borrowing the "ethnic unity" framing.

Her risk assessment is blunt. Established democracies still review extradition requests case by case, she said, and she remains relatively confident in them. The exposure is elsewhere: "Developing countries, or countries that already openly support China, are where wanted people face the highest risk."

On the triad question raised by Yaita's case, Lau said the tactic is not new to Hong Kongers, only new to Taiwan. Triad networks extend to London, the United States and Thailand, she said, and people with such backgrounds have turned up to harass protests in London. She described a 2023 demonstration in San Francisco against Xi Jinping's visit, held alongside Tibetan and Uyghur groups, where counter-protesters included men wearing studded gloves; several demonstrators were injured.

Because collusion between triads and the state is almost impossible to prove, she argued, the practical defence is administrative rather than criminal — immigration and visa screening — and depends heavily on how much local police understand the phenomenon. On Britain, she sees measured progress: awareness among officers has risen over the past year, the government published guidance on transnational repression, thin as it is, and the courts have learned a great deal from the Hong Kong trade office espionage prosecutions.

Sunai Phasuk, senior Thailand adviser in Human Rights Watch's Asia division, does not expect Bangkok to test the new statute at all.

"I don't see any sign at all that the Thai government or Thai authorities at large will argue or push back against China regarding the implementation of the new law," he said — and in his view Beijing hardly needs it. "China already takes Thailand as its backyard. It can come to arrest anyone, or it can let Thailand do the dirty bidding."

What the law adds, he said, is presentability. "The new law will make this cooperation appear lawful, and it will be used as an argument. If it faces criticism, if it faces condemnation, it can basically say it is implementing a law the two countries agreed to cooperate on."

The problem, he said, is regional rather than Thai. "There is now a kind of vast network across Southeast Asia working to serve the interests of China — identifying, hunting down exiled dissidents, including those with refugee status recognised by the UN. No one is spared." Once located, he said, people are arrested and handed over "in total disregard of international concerns for human rights or international laws. They don't care."

He described governments learning from one another: the use of arrest warrants to dress up detentions was pioneered elsewhere in the region and adopted because it worked, giving requests a documentary veneer. And domestic safeguards, he said, "are not working in any of the countries in this region."

Thai public opinion is a different matter. "Public reaction in Thailand has become more aware of interference by China, more aware of bullying behaviour by China, and they are not happy with the way that the Thai government has cooperated," he said. "There's been a lot of public criticism, in the mainstream media, in social media, against the Thai government, against the Chinese embassy in Bangkok, and against Beijing."

Taiwan's more immediate problem is that its criminal code was not written for this. "Basically, if he punches me and it's handled as ordinary assault, that's two or three months," Yaita said. Settle in advance, pay a little compensation, and even a defendant who refuses to settle may have left the country before enforcement.

He contrasted that with jurisdictions such as the United States, which he said use foreign agent registration statutes and heavy sentencing enhancements for organised cross-border crimes aimed at undermining democratic sovereignty — a characterisation that reflects his reading rather than a legal comparison Storm Media has verified.

"Six of them, a plan drawn up four days in advance, site reconnaissance, that much effort," he said. "The current law is obviously not suited to this kind of crime."

His two recommendations are narrow and administrative: tighter entry screening for people with criminal records, and heavier penalties.

Some of that architecture is being built. Taiwan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs held its first International Conference on Countering Transnational Repression on May 8, bringing legislators and specialists from the United States, Britain, Germany, Ireland and New Zealand together with Taiwanese agencies. The ministry set out a "2P1R" framework — prevention, protection and response — covering public awareness, emergency assistance through overseas missions, and a collective security network with like-minded governments.

What Yaita will not do is audit his own back catalogue for the offending article. Asked whether he had tried to identify what he wrote that provoked this, he described being told by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson years ago, when he was the only Japanese journalist excluded from a major diplomatic assignment in Beijing, to go back and read everything he had written and work it out himself.

He suspects nobody could name the piece — that this is precisely the function of a red line nobody publishes.

"Say they tell you the red line is that you may not criticize Xi Jinping," he said. "Fine. From now on we won't criticize Xi Jinping. We'll criticize Li Qiang (李強), or Cai Qi (蔡奇). Is that acceptable then? It doesn't work like that."