NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan — Prosecutors in Taiwan have indicted five people accused of plotting to run down stand-up comedian Huang Yi-hao with a car after his shows made fun of the Chinese government, including President Xi Jinping, ABC News and Reuters reported.
According to the New Taipei Prosecutors Office, the Taiwanese defendants were hired by a Chinese person, began tracking Huang in July, and planned to break his arms and legs so he could not perform. Huang was hit by a car as he rode home on his scooter last month and was left with a bruised pelvis. Two of the defendants have admitted their part in the plan, prosecutors said.
Huang said he had criticized Xi for only two and a half minutes. “Yet I was subsequently targeted with both a faeces-throwing attack and a deliberate vehicular assault,” he wrote on Facebook. In May, two people were prosecuted for spreading faeces and paint at a Taipei comedy club hours before one of his shows.
“If people can already be subjected to this kind of treatment simply for criticising the Chinese Communist Party when it does not even govern Taiwan, how can we expect to retain our current freedom of speech if the CCP were ever to rule Taiwan?” he wrote. He thanked police and prosecutors and invited them to his upcoming shows.
Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council said anyone who took orders from the Chinese Communist Party or its collaborators to carry out “transnational repression” would be “pursued to the end, with no leniency,” ABC News reported. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office did not respond to a request for comment. Beijing claims Taiwan as its territory and has threatened to use force to take it.
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