Workers reportedly arrested in Zhengzhou for equivalent of breach of trust.

Taipei, Taiwan – Four Taiwanese employees of Apple supplier Foxconn have been detained in China since January, Taiwan’s national news agency has reported.

The workers were detained in Zhengzhou, the home of Foxconn’s largest iPhone factory, by the local public security bureau for the equivalent of “breach of trust”, Central News Agency (CNA) reported Thursday, citing the Taiwanese government.

Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) cited Foxconn as stating that its employees had done nothing to harm the company’s interests and that it could not rule out corruption and abuse of power by a small number of police officers, CNA said.

The MAC told the Reuters and AFP news agencies that the case was “quite strange” and had “severely damaged business confidence”.

Foxconn and the MAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The case is the latest incident to draw attention to the risks facing Taiwanese living and working in China.

Last month, a court in Wenzhou sentenced Taiwanese independence activist Yang Chih-yuan to nine years in prison for secession in the first such prosecution of its kind.

Also last month, an executive of Taiwan’s Formosa Plastics was detained as he tried to leave China, CNA reported.

In June, the MAC raised the travel alert for China, Hong Kong, and Macau from “yellow” to “orange” and advised citizens against “unnecessary travel”, citing China’s strict national security and anti-espionage laws.

Taiwan’s National Security Bureau in July told the island’s legislature that, during the previous 12 months, 15 citizens had been detained or put on trial on Chinese soil, while 51 had been interrogated at the border.

Beijing’s Communist Party claims self-ruled Taiwan, whose formal name is the Republic of China, as one of its provinces, while Taipei insists it is a sovereign democracy.

Beijing also does not recognise dual citizenship and considers Taiwanese to be Chinese citizens.

Hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese lived and worked in China during the 1990s and 2000s, but their numbers have fallen sharply since the Beijing-sceptical Democratic Progressive Party took power in 2016, marking a deterioration in Chinese-Taiwanese relations.