Defector Justin Yifu Lin still a wanted man

New Express
May 7, 2009

Taiwan may lift its arrest order of Justin Yifu Lin, chief economist and senior vice president at the World Bank, reports today’s New Express, citing the Taiwan-based United Daily News.

Lin was one of five former Taiwan servicemen who defected to mainland China. On May 16, 1979, Lin, then a company commander stationed in Kinmen, an island 2 kilometers off Xiamen, Fujian Province, swam across the strait and landed on the mainland. Lin studied economics at Peking University and the University of Chicago, where he got his Ph.D. In 2008, Lin was appointed to be the senior vice president of the World Bank.

Although charges of defection were dropped after twenty years, military authorities in Taiwan issued another arrest order for him in 2002. Recently, however, former Legislative Yuan leader Hu Zhizhong and lawyer Chen Changwen have published articles calling for the lift of the arrest order. The proposal has been supported by Wang Qing-feng, Taiwan’s Minister of Law.

In response to the argument that the period in which Lin could be prosecuted for defection has already expired, Wang Qingqiang, director of military law in Taiwan, said that Lin’s offense is on-going, since he is still a National People’s Congress representative on the mainland. The count should only start on the day he quits the job.

Another Taiwan-related headline concerns Jiang Bingkun, chairman of Taiwan’s straits exchange foundation, who delivered his resignation request to Ma Yingjiu on May 4. Reports have speculated that criticism of Jiang for benefiting from Taiwanese businesspeople investing in the mainland had a significant bearing on his decision to resign.

The headline at the bottom of the page is about a roughly sixty-year-old woman from Zhejiang who gambled away 50 million yuan in a Macao casino. She went back with some friends and a plan to win back her money with a new strategy, but she was barred from gambling and shown the door. The woman threatened to sue the casino for modifying their machines to minimize gamblers’ chances of winning.