A Tough Case: Taiwan Deports a Chinese Influencer Who Calls For Annexing Taiwan

Plus, our next Book Club: Hisham Matar’s The Return

Dear all,

The news has been worrying and dizzying. The big news this week has been President Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of tariffs on all of the United States’s trading partners. Taiwan was not spared—Trump levied a 32% tariff on Taiwanese goods. President Lai Ching-te assembled an emergency meeting that met for over 100 hours and announced a series of measures—Taiwan will not implement any retaliatory tariffs, and the President hopes to move towards an eventual goal of “zero tariffs.”

For the past couple weeks, everyone in Taiwan has been talking about Yaya, a Chinese resident in Taiwan who was deported last week. Liu Zhenya (劉振亞), known online as “Yaya in Taiwan,” is a social media influencer who amassed 450,000 followers on Douyin, China’s most popular video-sharing platform. She’s repeatedly posted content supporting China's use of force to unify with Taiwan. In her most provocative instance, she praised China’s recent military exercise circling Taiwan, expressing excitement at the prospect of Taiwan being “covered with red flags with five stars.” (This is China’s flag.)

Though she had secured residency through a dependent visa granted by virtue of her Taiwanese husband, the government ultimately revoked it in response to her political activities. Their three young children were born and raised in Taiwan. News of her deportation sparked a wave of protests and counter-protests, with one rally descending into a shouting match between the two sides. Clips of her hugging her children shortly before she departed were widely circulated. Since the Yaya case broke, two more Chinese influencers who are married to Taiwanese men have been deported.

Yaya and her husband at a rally protesting her deportation. Photo credit: Tristan Hilderbrand for Radio Taiwan International.

The Anti-Yaya crowd. Photo credit: Tristan Hilderbrand for Radio Taiwan International.

We’re really torn about this case. In a single day we’ve changed our minds several times. In the morning, we say to each other: This deportation is morally wrong. Is Taiwan losing its soul? Consider: KMT officials, the gangsters working for them, and ordinary citizens have done far worse—courting the CCP and businesses in China, funneling money to paramilitary organizations, supporting pro-China media monopolies, creating disinformation networks, and selling state secrets. Why is the government spending its resources making a symbolic example out of a minority noncitizen? She posts mainly on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is banned on government phones but very popular among Taiwanese youth—more than 20% of Taiwan’s population uses the app.¹ But according to a friend who has been following the Chinese influencer world, Yaya’s most loyal followers were mostly living in second and third-tier cities in China. That this started as an inter-influencer conflict—she was reported to the government by a popular Taiwanese influencer (of whom we are a big fan)—only adds to the sense that this is more arbitrary than, say, a police investigation of a disinformation network. The outrage at Yaya in the media may have forced the government’s hand.

More, separating her from three Taiwanese citizen children is cruel. Extensive research shows that deporting parents causes psychological trauma and long-term developmental harm to children. We’ve worked firsthand with detained families separated under Trump. Before that, as a young lawyer fresh out of law school, Michelle helped families affected by deportations under Obama. Deportation causing family separation violates principles of the European Court of Human Rights that value family life and the interests of the child.² Under American standards, courts would have weighed the hardship to her three children in determining whether to deport her.³

We can’t help but think: at least some of the public support for her expulsion reflects a deeper callousness and ignorance about deportation in general—the terror of its arbitrariness, the violence of family separation. Can people not see the link between Yaya’s deportation and the deportation of darker-skinned peoples? Families separated for decades. Migrant workers who haven’t seen their mothers or children for a decade. Hard-working people who get picked off the street by security agents, handcuffed, and disappeared. The notion that Yaya is an exceptional case of “national security” unrelated to the broader machinery of deportation seems deeply naive. Deportation is a serious exercise of state power.

A number of Taiwanese people have invoked the analogy of guests and hosts: “You’re a guest in our house—so you have to obey our rules.” Sounds reasonable, right? But imagine a world where an ally of China—say, somewhere in Europe—expels a Taiwanese immigrant for advocating Taiwanese independence. We would fight to the death for that person to stay in the country. The host-guest logic sidesteps the hard questions, allowing the arrogance of citizenship to make expulsion seem self-evident. (And we should note: In a world where China invades and occupies Taiwan, a scenario where countries across the world expel Taiwanese immigrants to China for advocating Taiwanese sovereignty is not far-fetched. China currently gives the death penalty to people who advocate Taiwanese independence, and it bullies countries to use its police to track and expel Uighur diaspora.)

And finally, Taiwan, which so often champions its own democratic values, undermines its image by deporting her. Words used to criticize Khalil’s detention in the United States might apply here: “What could be more adverse to the nation’s foreign policy interests than attacking fundamental elements of our politics which people in other countries deeply admire—freedom of speech, freedom of petition, freedom of assembly?”

Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University student and green card holder who is detained by ICE for his pro-Palestinian activism. He is fighting his deportation case. Photo credit: CNN.

But by the afternoon, we’ll change our minds. Yaya is nothing at all like Khalil, who criticized Israel’s killings of children and women in Gaza. She’s nothing like Robert Galvan, a tuna fish canning factory worker-activist who grew up in the United States; labeled a communist, he was deported to Mexico, where he would die at age 46. Nor does Yaya’s misdeed resemble those who, outrageously, have been deported in the U.S. for laughably small offenses—jumping a turnstile, stealing scraps from a dumpster, owning drug paraphernalia, or stealing $2 worth of beer.⁴ Yaya’s case is more comparable to the Fascist League of North America, which was intent on spreading fascist ideology within Italian American communities.⁵ Or more recently, Russians spreading disinformation about Nazis and threatening ethnic minorities in democratic countries.⁶

Yaya’s words are not empty—they have context. And that context is undeniable: a powerful, aggressive state sends planes and ships into Taiwanese territory daily. China just kicked off a round of surprise drills, sending ships into waters 24 nautical miles off Taiwan’s coast, the closest it has ever been to the Taiwanese mainland. Taiwan is under exceptional threat. Can we apply human rights principles around family unity and freedom of speech when facing such a massive danger? The threat of foreign agents in Taiwan is not imagined—it is real, tangible, pressing. Just earlier this year, a military officer was sentenced for seeking to establish a paramilitary group that would support Chinese invasion. Just this week, aides to President Lai have been charged with spying. China spreads disinformation, bribes military personnel, and establishes paramilitary networks with the goal of subverting Taiwan. Some Chinese influencers who openly support invasion are funded or enlisted by a state apparatus designed to erode Taiwanese morale and sow internal division.

From this perspective, other countries’ cases of deportation provide limited guidance. A large, powerful country deporting someone to a poorer one is very different from a small, threatened country deporting foreign nationals who support its violent annexation. These individuals are backed by the resources, reach, and force of a superpower. China has the world’s largest standing army and is on track to have the biggest defense budget. From Hollywood to Apple, from Elon Musk to Volkswagen, governments, corporations, and billionaires collaborate with China.

This case highlights the unique dilemma of Taiwan’s existence. It appeals to its strong human rights record as a basis for recognition, yet any compromise on those rights weakens that very rationale. Under relentless pressure from China—a state determined to break it—Taiwan faces an urgent question: Is the marketplace of ideas truly free? As Fara Dabhoiwala has shown, free speech has long been a “weaponized mantra” used by the powerful and the moneyed to expand their dominance in the public sphere. Can a small nation withstand the overwhelming force of China’s influence, wealth, military, and power? Indeed, the traditional free speech framework, which assumes that counter-speech can neutralize harmful speech, no longer holds. As legal scholar Wei-an Tsai observes, “Social platform algorithms create echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs, making meaningful discourse and rebuttal less effective.”

Further, unlike most deportation cases litigated before the European Court of Human Rights, Yaya is not being deported to a place she is unfamiliar with, nor to a country experiencing war or extreme poverty. Considering family separation, the Taiwan judgment noted that cross-strait travel is possible and cited “the convenience of modern transportation and communication.”⁷ Meanwhile, some Chinese netizens have also pointed out a glaring inconsistency in Yaya’s message: one netizen noted that if Yaya loves the motherland, why wasn’t she overjoyed to be returning to the mother’s embrace? They also posted clips saying that China would embrace her with open arms. (There have been amusing posts from Chinese netizens telling her to come back and bring her children.)

More, the deportation of Yaya has legal precedent. As Michael Turton notes, in 2019 the Taiwanese government deported a Chinese academic who planned to give a speech advocating unification. Last year, the government deported two Chinese nationals who harassed peaceful protesters.

And probably most significantly—and this was invoked by the Taiwanese government—Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights prohibits “war propaganda” and incitement to war. As Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng stated, discussing independence or unification is protected speech. But advocating war, military reunification, or the eradication of the sovereignty of the Republic of China goes beyond the scope of free speech. Thus, he concludes, Yaya’s posts supporting "military reunification" are not protected speech. This provision has also been invoked in Ukraine’s shutting down of pro-Russian channels. Pro-Yaya groups have denounced the deportation as “Green Terror,” but this is unconvincing. Across the world, advocacy for the overthrow of one’s government is generally not considered protected speech.⁸

We are torn, as we said, but we lean towards thinking the deportation was wrong. We’re willing to change our minds if new information comes to light that Yaya had direct connections to the Chinese state—which, our contacts suggest, is possible. This fifth column exists in Taiwan—make no mistake about it. But such evidence of her contacts with the CCP has not been made public, nor was it part of the administrative judgment that legalized her deportation. A law prohibiting war propaganda—which currently does not exist—would have granted her a proverbial day in court, upholding due process and demonstrating a commitment to public accountability through evidence-based argument and legal procedure.

Our political consciousness was forged in the decade after 9/11, when the expansion of “national security” interests throughout the world were used to justify shrinking the rights of foreign nationals. National security was invoked to expand surveillance, justify mass deportations, secret detentions, and criminalize people whose views were unpalatable.

True, Taiwan is not like Europe or the U.S. We are a small country under threat of annihilation. This is a different existential threat than the “terrorism” that Euro-Americans invoked in the decade after 9/11 to deport people. But using national security as justification to deport a person creates conditions for dangerous slippage. One must publicly and forcefully question the possible erosion of civil liberties. On a visceral level, Yaya’s videos repulse us—particularly now, as the Chinese encircle Taiwan. But we aren’t convinced her posts alone reflect a threat to national security. Does this decision merit radicalizing one part of the population further?

We also find it troubling that all of the influencers deported in this case were women. On the one hand, this fact is inherent to the system of immigration, as the majority of Chinese spouses are women. But the attacks feel gendered; people seem especially incensed by women, giving them greater scrutiny than men. Women are regarded as threatening because they hold literal power to reproduce values.

At heart, the deportation of Yaya risks becoming a tactical misstep in what Antonio Gramsci might call the ongoing “war of position.” More than 360,000 Chinese spouses live in Taiwan today. While they may appear to be a demographic minority, their family networks make up a significant portion of society—one the government now risks alienating. By expelling Yaya, Taiwan may have inadvertently handed Beijing an easy propaganda victory, allowing both the Chinese government and pro-Beijing voices within Taiwan to frame her as a casualty of an alleged crackdown on pro-China expression. Already, the Chinese state media has cast her as a symbol of repression, reinforcing the long-term propaganda effort to undermine Taiwanese unity from within. The deportation of Yaya has only served to divide an already incredibly polarized society more, at a time when unity is more important than ever in the face of Chinese aggression.

Earlier last month, a death row inmate was executed, and President Lai announced a series of measures to deal with the “enemies within.” We don’t think he’s a tenth as bad as the KMT or TPP. But we have to say we feel nervous. The real PR coup of the Tsai administration was its success in framing Taiwan as a progressive beacon facing the authoritarian threat of China. The global climate may have shifted in the past year, but we remain firmly convinced that this remains the most effective path for Taiwan to assert its voice and agency in the international arena.

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Book Club: Hisham Matar’s The Return

Thanks to our wonderful book club members—we’re always so grateful for these friendships across the world. After reading My Friends, we wanted to stay with Hisham Matar a little longer. For our next book club, we’ll be reading The Return, where he recounts his journey to Libya in search of his father, who disappeared when he was a teenager. With daylight savings in effect, our next meeting will be on Friday, April 25 7 PM (EST) / Saturday, April 26 at 7 AM Taiwan time (sorry for the early hour!). Reply to this email for the zoom link.

1. We apologize for a factual error in a previous version of this piece—we wrote that Douyin was banned completely in Taiwan, when it is banned on government phones. Many thanks to Catherine Chou for pointing out this error.

2. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects the right to family and private life. In Jeunesse v. Netherlands (2014), the European Court of Human Rights found that a Surinamese woman, mother of Dutch citizen children, faced deportation. The court ruled in her favor, emphasizing the best interests of the child and the exceptional hardship that deportation would cause.

3. How do U.S. courts weigh family unity and hardship when they deport a parent with citizen children? It depends on the status of the parent. If the parent is a legal permanent resident, judges balance positive factors, among them strong family ties, long residence, and hardship to family against negative factors, like criminal history. By contrast, individuals who are in the U.S. temporarily—such as those married to U.S. citizens, residing on spousal visas such as Yaya’s, but who have not yet obtained green cards—have to show ten years of continuous presence and prove that the deportation will cause “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship” to a relative. Sadly, this is a very stringent standard; courts regard “ordinary” hardship to children, including economic and psychological effects of separation, as insufficient. Generally, a parent has to show that the child has a severe medical condition. Yaya wouldn’t have passed this test. One significant opponent of this test was Judge Pregerson in the Ninth Circuit, who dissented 139 times, refusing to deport parents who had citizen children, writing in one case that he prayed “the good men and women in our Congress will ameliorate the plight of families and give us humane laws that will not cause the disintegration of such families.” Memije v. Gonzales, 481 F.3d (9th Cir. 2007). For a historical portrait of how the hardship standard evolved, read Mae Ngai’s classic book Impossible Subjects.

4. A legal permanent resident—a 42 year-old man who had been in the U.S. since he was two years old—was deported as an “aggravated felon” after shoplifting a $2 can of beer. Lopez-Valencia v. Lynch, 798 F.3d (9th Cir. 2015).

5. Even though the United States monitored fascist-leaning Italian Americans in the 1920s and 30s, deportation efforts were rarely directed at them. Instead, authorities focused on leftists like Carlo Tresca—a prominent labor organizer, socialist, and anti-fascist who edited several radical newspapers. In 1924, he was convicted of publishing obscenity and sentenced to deportation, but public outrage led President Calvin Coolidge to commute the sentence. Tresca was assassinated in 1943; the case is still unsolved.

6. For a thoughtful engagement comparing the Yaya case with that of Russian misinformation in Latvia, see Chang Chuanfen’s incisive column in Upmedia (in Mandarin). She argues that Yaya was much more explicitly provocative, Taiwan is in a much more dangerous geopolitical moment, and yet Taiwan meted out a much lighter punishment compared to Latvia.

7. The full quote from the judgment: “There are no significant obstacles to cross-strait travel for individuals from Taiwan and mainland China. Moreover, the Original Order does not prevent the appellant from visiting Taiwan under other legal grounds, such as through visas unrelated to dependent residence. Additionally, the appellant’s spouse may travel to mainland China for family reunification. Given these circumstances, it is not reasonable to assume that short-term separation would inevitably lead to the breakdown of the marital relationship. Furthermore, the couple's children still have their Taiwanese parent available for care and education. Considering the convenience of modern transportation and communication, the court does not find that the failure to suspend execution of the Original Order would cause irreparable harm to the appellant’s family life or their children's welfare.”

8. In the United States, such speech is protected unless it incites imminent lawless action (Brandenburg v. Ohio). In the UK, support for extremist or terrorist groups—regardless of direct incitement—is punishable, as in the Anjem Choudary case. In India, only speech that incites violence or has strong tendency to create public disorder can be punished. In Germany, advocacy of overthrowing the democratic order is restricted. China offers no protection for speech, including peaceful speech, that criticizes state power. Turkey has used anti-terror laws to suppress dissenting journalism and separatist speech. Liberal democracies tend to require a clear risk of violence, while more authoritarian states criminalize even peaceful advocacy for systemic change. Yaya's speech is a tricky matter; it does not incite lawless action immediately, and it's not clear if she has a group affiliation. But is her advocacy peaceful, and how should our standards change because of Taiwan’s perilous situation? This merits an intensive discussion.