Expatriate Returns Home to Prison, Not Democracy : Taiwan: Zau-Nan Chen’s family and friends say he is innocent, not an advocate of violence and sedition.

WESTMINSTER —  When Taiwanese officials finally gave Zau-Nan Chen a visa to return to his homeland last spring, the Westminster businessman took it as a sign that Taiwan’s new government was serious about democratic reform.

Instead, the video store owner and democracy activist was arrested before he got off the plane at the Taipei airport.

Though Chen is an Austrian citizen who has lived in the United States for a decade, Taiwanese officials jailed him and charged him with sedition. On Sept. 22, he was convicted and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison.

A spokeswoman for the Taiwan government in Los Angeles said Chen had advocated the violent overthrow of the island’s government. But Chen’s wife and friends insist that he is a political prisoner who was targeted because of his association with Taiwan’s most famous dissident, Hsu Hsin-liang.

Between 1980 and 1984, Chen was general manager of the Formosa Weekly, a now-defunct newspaper published by Hsu in Los Angeles, associates said. The newspaper criticized martial law in Taiwan and was a rallying point for the political opposition in Southern California.

Among the evidence against Chen was a 1984 series of articles published by the newspaper about urban guerrilla warfare. The government alleges that the articles were aimed at “inciting people to start guerrilla warfare to overthrow the government on Taiwan,” said Carol Cho, spokeswoman for the Coordination Council for North American Affairs, Taiwan’s quasi-official diplomatic mission in Los Angeles.

“They tried to paint Mr. Chen as a violent (person). He is not,” said Chen’s longtime friend Ching J. Shieh, a Fountain Valley aerospace engineer who attended part of Chen’s trial in Taipei. “We maintain that we promote the Taiwanese democratic process through peaceful means.”

Chen’s conviction has left his wife, an ailing piano teacher, struggling to manage three children and three businesses alone. Fung In Chen, 43, was hospitalized briefly last week with a bleeding ulcer, a condition she says has been worsened by the stress of her husband’s arrest.

“I support my husband’s ideals, that he cares about his motherland so much,” she said through an interpreter during an interview Thursday. “He’s the kind of a man that I respect very much. But being his wife and the mother of three, I also worry that it will end up like a nightmare.”

“Our three children, they’ve been very understanding . . .,” she said. Mrs. Chen bowed her head low and covered her hands with her eyes, but tears dropped onto the table in front of her. “Of course, they worry about their father very much.”

Chen’s arrest has also left Taiwanese-Americans like Shieh wondering why Taiwan’s officials gave Chen a visa if they intended to arrest him, whether other U.S. citizens risk retaliation for political activities in this country, and whether the Taipei government is sincere about ending four decades of one-party rule.

“This is a big case here,” said Vincent Diau, a Los Angeles reporter for the Chinese Daily News, the leading Chinese-language newspaper in Southern California. “In this case Mr. Chen is arrested, but who is next nobody knows. . . . The situation right now is very unpredictable.”

Chen’s backers say the businessman has been made a scapegoat since many far more prominent dissidents, including Chen’s mentor, Hsu, have been pardoned.

Hsu spent nearly a decade in exile in Los Angeles and was repeatedly refused permission to return to Taiwan. Last year, he was arrested when he tried to slip back into Taiwan on a fishing boat and was convicted of sedition. In May, Hsu and nine others were freed by Taiwan’s new President Lee Teng-hui.

“The president gave everyone the impression that this is the time for the wounds to heal, and everyone who has previously opposed the government should come back and talk,” said Daniel Sheh, who owned a business next door to Chen’s. “So he went back and he was arrested.”

Chen was arrested on June 24 and released six days later. On July 4, the government and opposition agreed on democratic reforms, including a popular vote for president, a decision that one opposition leader called “a peaceful revolution.” In light of that, Chen’s wife said she expected the charges to be dropped, but his trial began in August.

The Austrian consul general in Los Angeles, Franz Cede, said he was “flabbergasted” to learn Thursday from a reporter of Chen’s conviction, since the last report from the embassy was that Chen had been freed. Cede said he intended to inform Vienna of the case but was not optimistic.

“Definitely it will not be easy for the Austrian authorities to help him in Taiwan as we do not have diplomatic representation there,” Cede said.

Chen’s troubles began when he boarded a plane on June 22 to return home for the first time in 20 years. He and his wife had left Taiwan in 1969 to study music in Austria, Mrs. Chen said. There, they renounced their Taiwanese citizenship and became Austrian citizens. Chen became involved in Taiwanese exile politics.

In 1980, the couple moved to Southern California to help Hsu launch his newspaper. Though Chen occasionally wrote editorials, he was mainly involved in fund raising and managing the business side of the newspaper, she said.

In 1984, Chen left the newspaper to start his own business. His Taiwanese Cultural Center, which rents Chinese-language videotapes and sells books and magazines, now has branches in Westminster, Irvine and Huntington Beach. Though Mrs. Chen became a U.S. citizen, Chen retained Austrian citizenship so he could look after business interests there, she said.

In 1985, Chen joined the newly formed Taiwan Revolutionary Party, of which Hsu was also a member. Spokeswoman Cho said the party advocated overthrowing the government by force; Chen’s associates say the party explicitly rejected violence.

Chen had been refused a visa to return to Taiwan since his days in Austria, but he continued to apply each year, his wife said. His mother had surgery this spring, and he was desperate to go back. When his visa came through on June 12, he was ecstatic, friends said.

“For over 20 years he has been refused to go back,” said Leonard Hsu, a Monterey Park businessman and secretary general of the Taiwan Democratic Movement Overseas. “For somebody like him, he was so happy when he got a visa from the government, so it was really like falling into a trap by the (ruling) government.”

According to Cho, Chen was well aware that a warrant had been issued for his arrest in 1985 because property he owned in Taipei had been seized by the government. Regaining that property was the real motive for Chen’s trip, Taiwanese officials said.

“When he applied (for) the visa, my colleague in the visa section advised him that he would be arrested because he is on the wanted list,” Cho said. Moreover, she said, Chen signed a statement saying that he would accept legal responsibility for his words and deeds during his years abroad, “even if this means putting myself in prison.”

Chen’s friends, however, insist that if such a warrant did exist, it was never made public.

“The warrant was never published until he was arrested, and then the government claimed the warrant was issued in 1988,” Shieh said. He said Chen was warned he might be questioned upon arrival in Taipei but was never told of the warrant.

Daniel Sheh, who owns an insurance business next to Chen, said he isn’t involved in exile politics but believes that the Taiwan government has no right to try a foreign national for treason.

“I’m an American citizen and I was born and raised in Taiwan,” Sheh said. “I thought that I am protected by the First Amendment. . . . But then this constitutional right has been challenged by foreign authorities. This is the real issue here.”