Taiwanese lawmakers criticize China, Macau customs

Several Taiwanese lawmakers slammed China for Macau customs officials’ recent decision to refuse entry to a Taiwanese woman whose passport bore a sticker that read “Taiwan is my country.”
The woman, surnamed Su, is a dancer. She and her troupe arrived in Macau on Thursday last week for performances on Friday and Saturday, Apple Daily reported.
Su was taken into a small room for questioning and was allegedly told, “You are asking for trouble by challenging China’s authority.”
Su told Apple Daily that she had placed the sticker on her passport when she was still studying abroad in 2012, and had no trouble entering Japan, South Korea and European nations in the past four years. However, she was asked to sign an affidavit and was put on the next available flight back to Taiwan, despite expressing her willingness to remove the sticker so as to not jeopardize her chances of entering Macau for her performances.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Ho Hsin-chun stated on Facebook that the incident had exposed China’s ugly side of being “truculent and unreasonable,” just over a month before the upcoming swearing-in of the new Taiwanese government, headed by the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen, on May 20.
“Because of this sticker, a young dancer was deported by Macau customs officials, which affected her work,” Ho said.
“I demand that the Straits Exchange Foundation lodge a protest and negotiate with China, and that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ personnel stationed in Macau also take their complaints to the Macau government and customs, to safeguard our citizens’ freedom, personal security and right to work,” Ho added, cited by the Taipei Times.
Meanwhile, New Power Party Legislator Freddy Lim claimed that the incident has highlighted China’s deliberate attempts to single out Taiwanese people and make things difficult for them.
“Unless there is evidence that there have also been cases of U.S. or Japanese citizens being denied entry when seeking to enter Hong Kong or Macau with sticker-adorned passports, it is without doubt that the policy only targets Taiwanese,” Lin said.
Conversely, Eleanor Wang, a spokeswoman of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained that any unauthorized modifications made to a passport could hamper its identification purposes and global credibility, emphasizing that Taiwanese passports currently enjoy visa-free or landing visa status in 164 countries.
According to the spokeswoman, Macau’s customs officials this year refused entry to 16 individuals due to stickers on their passports. Staff reporter