Apple: Taiwanese employees of Apple supplier detained in China

Chinese authorities have detained four employees of Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer that makes Apple iPhones, Taiwan said, in the latest incident involving government scrutiny of the private sector in mainland China.

The police in Zhengzhou, China, had accused each of the four Taiwanese workers of an offense comparable to Taiwan’s “crime of breach of trust,” according to a statement Thursday from Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.

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

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

Foxconn declined to comment.

Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, was asked about the detentions Friday at a daily briefing. “I don’t know the specifics of your question, and it’s not a question related to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,” she said.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council declined to elaborate on where or when the detentions had taken place. Some reports in Taiwanese news media said all four Foxconn employees were detained in January in Zhengzhou, which is 400 miles southwest of Beijing. Other reports said two of the employees were detained in Zhengzhou in January and that two were detained in April in Shenzhen, which is in southern China. A woman answering the phone for the Zhengzhou police said she was not personally aware of the case but that any questions would have 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 gone missing in mainland China, often in cases involving fraud allegations, according to Luo Wen-jia, secretary-general of the Straits Exchange Foundation, a semiofficial organization in Taiwan that handles relations with mainland China. He warned Taiwanese against being lured to the mainland to participate in illegal schemes.

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

Local and provincial governments across China are running out of cash and struggling to maintain public services. One of their main sources of money — frequent sales of state land to developers — has dried up because of the housing market crash.

Many multinationals and Taiwanese enterprises depend 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.