Taiwanese employees at Foxconn, Apple’s supplier, are detained in China

Taiwan said Chinese authorities have arrested four employees of Foxconn, the Taiwanese company that makes Apple’s iPhones, in the latest incident related to government scrutiny of the private sector in mainland China.

Police in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou have charged each of the four Taiwanese workers with a crime similar to Taiwan’s “crime of breach of trust,” according to a statement issued Thursday by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.

The council described Foxconn by saying that “the company did not suffer any losses, and the four employees did not harm the company’s interests.” The Taiwan government statement added that the arrests may have been the result of “corruption and abuse of power” by law enforcement officers. It was not clear what jobs Foxconn employees performed.

Foxconn, one of the world’s largest consumer electronics manufacturers, plays a central role in manufacturing iPhones and other products for Apple.

Foxconn declined to comment.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning was asked about the arrests on Friday at a daily news conference. She said: “I do not know the details of your question, and it is not a question related to the State Department.”

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council declined to provide further details about the location and time of the arrests. Some reports in Taiwanese media said that all four Foxconn employees were arrested in January in the city of Zhengzhou, located 400 miles southwest of Beijing. Other reports said that two employees were arrested in Zhengzhou in January, and two others were arrested in April in Shenzhen, southern China.

A woman answering the phone on behalf of Zhengzhou police said she was not personally aware of the case, but any questions had to be answered by police media personnel, whose phone number she declined to provide.

Since January, there have been 77 incidents in which Taiwanese have disappeared in mainland China, often in cases involving allegations of fraud, according to Lu Wen-jia, secretary-general of the Cross-Strait Exchange Foundation, a semi-official organization in Taiwan that handles relations with the mainland. Main. China. He warned Taiwanese against being lured to the mainland to participate in illegal schemes.

Foreign and domestic companies in mainland China are increasingly facing fines and tax audits. Chinese state media reported in October 2023 that Foxconn faced tax audits in four provinces, including Henan Province, of which Zhengzhou is the capital.

Local and regional governments across China are strapped for funds and struggling to maintain public services. One of their main sources of money – frequent sales of state land to developers – dried up due to the collapse of the housing market.

Many multinational corporations and Taiwanese companies rely on large numbers of Taiwanese to run their operations in mainland China. But the Taiwanese government and lawmakers have issued a series of warnings about travel to the mainland.

Megan Tobin Contributed to reports.