Taipei, Taiwan: A Taiwanese rights activist has raised concerns over the violations of human rights in China. The activist has returned from China after serving five year jail term for subversion.

 “After being improperly detained by China for more than 1,852 days, Lee Ming-cheh arrived at Taiwan’s Taoyuan International Airport at around 10 a.m. today, April 15, 2022,” Radio Free Asia quoted the statement of a coalition of rights groups that campaigned for Lee’s release.

“Our family’s suffering is over, but there are still countless people whose human rights are being violated in China. May they one day have their day of liberation, too. We know that freedom comes from oneself, just as the people of Taiwan traded blood and tears under martial law for freedom, democracy and human rights. May the Chinese people know and learn from this,” he added.

https://45742dd2afb42cd38049fc4a3369e764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html Notably, Lee is an activist with Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which is vilified by Beijing for refusing to accept its claim on the island. He was sentenced to five years in jail for “attempting to subvert state power” in November 2017, according to the media outlet.

https://45742dd2afb42cd38049fc4a3369e764.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html According to Amnesty International’s Taiwan branch, Lee, who was accused of setting up social media chat groups to “vilify China” was barred from speaking to his wife on the phone, or from writing letters home during his jail term.

Meanwhile, terming Lee’s incarceration “unacceptable”, the Taiwan government called on the Chinese government to protect the rights of Taiwanese nationals in China.

“Lee Ming-cheh … was tried by a Chinese court for ‘subversion of state power’ and imprisoned for five years, which is unacceptable to the people of Taiwan,” the media outlet quoted Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) spokesman Chiu Chui-cheng as saying on Friday.

Notably, Taiwan has been governed independently from mainland China for over seven decades.

However, Beijing views the island as its province, while Taiwan, which is a territory with its own democratically-elected government, maintains that it is an autonomous country.