China’s move to provide local IDs to Taiwanese visitors alarms Taipei

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China is registering an increasing number of Taiwanese for local residency or even identity cards, in an effort to incorporate them into its society that is raising alarm bells in Taipei.

Taiwan government officials said Beijing had “concentrated” on getting visiting Taiwanese to apply for Chinese residence cards, bank accounts and local mobile phone numbers, known as the “three documents,” and many were then given local ID cards that are reserved. for citizens.

“We are concerned that when more and more Taiwanese have Chinese citizenship, our jurisdiction will be compromised,” said a senior Chinese policy official in Taipei. “If a Taiwanese with a Chinese ID were involved in an incident here, China could say it should deal with the problem because the person is its citizen and intervene in our internal affairs.”

The pressure is seen as particularly worrying as China is steadily expanding a multifaceted pressure campaign against Taiwan. Beijing claims the island as part of its territory and threatens to take it by force if Taipei resists unification indefinitely.

Similar tactics of granting local status to citizens of neighboring countries have long been part of Russia’s playbook. Moscow issued passports to eastern Ukrainians who moved to Russia after it helped orchestrate the conflict in the region in 2014. Russia also granted citizenship to residents of two breakaway regions of Georgia, later citing the need to protect them as a pretext. for a brief war in 2008. .

Taiwanese officials said China’s pressure to deliver more local Taiwanese newspapers had not yet reached that level, but posed a risk of the same nature.

The issue arose when a documentary by a Taiwanese video blogger in late December suggested that hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese had Chinese identity cards. Lin Chin-cheng, a Taiwanese who runs a Chinese government-backed start-up center for young Taiwanese entrepreneurs in the Chinese city of Quanzhou, claims in the film that around 200,000 Taiwanese have Chinese identity cards.

That claim could not be confirmed. But Taiwanese government officials, tourists and businesspeople said visitors to China in recent months had been asked to fill out applications for the “three documents.”

At the centenary celebrations of the Whampoa Military Academy in China last year, veterans from Taiwan were registered at special desks, participants said. The Cross-Straits Forum, an annual event that is part of the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front’s tactics to engage Taiwanese who are not openly hostile to it, also featured “three documents” request tables. Three Taiwanese who recently traveled to China on a ferry from Taiwan-controlled Kinmen said arrival procedures in Xiamen now included filling out forms that they only later understood were requests for those documents.

The residence card for Taiwanese, which is part of the “three documents”, is not equivalent to Chinese citizenship: Beijing presents it as a preferential measure to allow Taiwanese equal access to local services.

But Taipei fears it is becoming the entry point to citizen status. “Local ID is often the immediate next step, or even offered directly in place of the resident card,” said one homeland security official. Taiwanese officials added that local IDs were being heavily promoted as an opportunity to get better terms on loans or home sales.

Under Taiwanese law, citizens who obtain a Chinese ID will have their Taiwanese household registration revoked. But Taipei struggles to effectively monitor the actions of its citizens in China, as Beijing has cut off almost all official communication with the Taiwanese government, although cross-Strait travel, trade and investment built over decades continues. According to the government statistics bureau, 217,000 Taiwanese worked in China in 2023, only half the numbers seen at the peak a decade ago, but still a 22 percent increase from the previous year.

Taiwan President Lai Ching-te last week warned the public not to be fooled by the supposed short-term profits of Chinese newspapers.

“In Taiwan we have an old saying: free things are very expensive. That’s very true,” he told reporters after his New Year’s speech. Lai noted that many Chinese take enormous risks by migrating illegally to other nations, arguing that obtaining a Chinese ID at this time was absurd for a citizen of a democratic country and could be “the end of their path to the world.”

Beijing’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.