Maybe the Chinese Communist Party should give Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin and other Chinese diplomats access to a regularly updated database about all the Chinese nationals like Fan Yuntao that the CCP has grabbed. Then they’d be better able to answer questions about missing Chinese nationals.
With regard to what happened to Fan, all Wang can say is that he “does not have information about that.”
Fan Yuntao (shown above) is a professor of international law and political science at Asia University in Tokyo who a year ago thought he was going home to China for just a few weeks before resuming professorial duties in Japan. Shortly before he went missing, he told people that Chinese authorities wanted him for questioning.
The Japanese government is following the case. On April 22, 2024, the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayasha, said that the matter “could be related to the human rights of the professor.” Could be. But the secretary “declined to elaborate further on the matter, citing its sensitive nature.”
The Japan Times reports: “In 2019, Yuan Keqin, a professor at Japan’s Hokkaido University of Education, vanished after traveling to China for a family funeral. China’s foreign ministry later said he had confessed to spying and was in custody. And in 2013, Zhu Jianrong, a professor at Tokyo’s Toyo Gakuen University, was detained by Chinese authorities on suspicion of illegal intelligence-gathering, also after vanishing on a trip home.”
Yuan, Zhu, and Fan probably made the mistake of talking about something that the Chinese government didn’t want them to talk about, or articulated the “wrong” opinion about something, which is one of the kinds of actions that the CCP calls “spying” or “subversion” or consorting with foreign interferers. Another mistake the professors made: having left China, they went back.
