Chinese Hijackers Wear Out Welcome, Face Jail in Taiwan : Asia: They may even be sent back by a nation with investments on mainland and a large stake in safe air travel.

Shi Yuebo, a former wool salesman in China, said he hijacked a Chinese regional airliner in August to escape communism by fleeing to democratic, free Taiwan.

“The mainland,” said Shi, 30, who abandoned his wife and three small children in Hebei province to come here, “is like an airplane that was hijacked by the Communists for more than 40 years.”

In his mind, one hijacking deserved another.

Yang Mingde, 31, said he was frustrated trying to find a decent job as a truck driver when, accompanied by his wife and 8-year-old son, he hijacked another airliner in Sichuan province in October, diverting the aircraft to Taiwan’s Chiang Kai-shek International Airport.

Both men were surprised at what happened when they landed. Expecting to be treated like heroes by the Taiwanese government, which has honored hijackers from China as “freedom fighters,” they were arrested and jailed at the Taoyuan Detention Center. Both face 12-year prison sentences for their crimes.

Yang’s wife received an eight-year sentence, and the couple’s young son has been placed in a foster home.

Taiwanese authorities, eager to show that their country no longer coddles air pirates, even those from China proclaiming anti-Communist sentiments, recently have begun handing out stiffer sentences in air piracy cases.

Some officials, in a policy shift unimaginable a few years ago, now speak of sending the hijackers back to face the unforgiving Communist court system.

Since April, eight aircraft have been hijacked in the People’s Republic of China to Taiwan, which calls itself the Republic of China. The latest incident was Wednesday when a young man, armed with a surgical knife, hijacked a China Northern Airlines MD-82 airliner with 129 passengers and eight crew en route from Qingdao in northeast China to Fuzhou in the southeast. The plane landed safely in Taipei.

Taiwanese authorities said four Chinese fighter planes scrambled in an unsuccessful effort to halt the hijacking. The hijacker, Gao Jun, 25, was arrested and held for trial, and authorities said he would probably be returned to China after serving any prison time. Police said his female companion was not arrested because she was not aware of the hijacking plan.

It was the second time in less than a month that the same Qingdao-to-Fuzhou flight had been hijacked. The unprecedented series of hijackings in recent months has greatly tested the patience of the Taiwanese and infuriated Beijing.

The traditional Taiwanese hostility toward the Communist government--a legacy of the civil war that drove Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek to Taiwan in 1949--has been dulled in recent years because of massive Taiwanese investment in Chinese industry.

Up to $30 billion has been invested in China, some sources say, and these economic ties have softened ideological differences.

Also, few places in the world are more dependent on air travel than Taiwan, adding to its growing reluctance to be seen as a haven for hijackers.

Last year, this country of 21 million people registered 4.5 million incoming and outgoing international passengers.

Finally, there is a growing fear on this prosperous island about the possibility of massive illegal immigration of economic refugees from the relatively impoverished mainland.

Airline hijacking is the highest-profile example but, in a little publicized development, the Taiwanese government already deports any Chinese citizens it catches coming across the Taiwan Strait.

As a result of these factors, after the first series of hijackings last summer, Taiwan authorities began to mete out tougher penalties to the offenders.

In some cases, they even agreed with Chinese assertions that the hijackers were really criminals or credit deadbeats simply using hijacking as an excuse to flee prosecution in their homeland.

“It is clear that some of these people (hijackers) do not have political motivations,” Taiwan government spokesman Jason C. Hu said in a recent interview here. “Some of them claim to, but it can be established that some have committed crimes or other deviations.”

As a result, Hu said, “There is a real possibility of repatriating them after sentencing or after they have served their sentence.”

Some members of the Taiwanese legislature have called for even harsher measures. Ting Shou-chung, a ruling Nationalist Party member, called recently for “death or life sentences or simply repatriating them immediately.”

At the invitation of Taiwanese officials, China’s Assn. for Relations across the Taiwan Strait agreed Thursday to send a delegation to Taipei beginning Dec. 18 to discuss possible return of the hijackers, as well as fishing disputes in the straits. It is the first time that mainland officials have traveled to Taiwan for talks.

After three incidents in one week early this fall, some frustrated Taiwanese lawmakers even suggested that the rash of hijackings might be part of an elaborate Chinese plot to test the island’s air defenses. “Each hijacking involved different aircraft coming from different directions,” said one official, his voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper.

In speeches before the legislature, Taiwanese politicians have accused China of lax security regulations at airports and even of cowardice for not physically intervening in the cases where the hijacker’s threat of violence was obviously false.

The Chinese hijackers included two medical doctors, two drivers, a clerk, a photo studio employee and a salesman.

To hijack an aircraft, Shi Yuebo used a shampoo bottle filled with a mild acid that he said he planned to drink if the attempt failed. Yang Mingde carried a kitchen knife, three bottles of ink and some vegetable seed wrapped to look like explosives.

As part of their effort to demonstrate a tough new stance on Chinese hijackings, Taiwan officials permitted The Times to interview Shi and Yang last week at the Taoyuan penal institution, 25 miles west of the capital, Taipei.

“The explosives were fake,” said Yang, a painfully thin man who wore his prison jacket zipped up tight around his neck as though he was cold in the balmy Taiwan climate. He shivered and lowered his eyes. “I could never kill anyone.”

Other weapons used by the hijackers included a toy gun, a fruit knife with some toothpaste tubes (again meant to resemble explosives), a blood pressure gauge and a bar of soap wrapped with electrical wire.

“We don’t want to say that mainland China encouraged the hijackers,” government spokesman Hu said. “But we find it highly unsatisfactory that mainland China is not doing its share to prevent these kinds of events from happening. A bar of soap! You’ve got to be kidding. Some people say that next time you can use a toothpick to hijack an airplane.”

In China, authorities complained that the hijackings resulted from a continued policy of enticement by Taiwanese authorities.

They asserted that the Taiwanese encouraged such incidents to score political points on the world stage, on which they saw themselves locked in an eternal battle with the Communists for control of China.

Historically, at least, the Communists had a point. Not long ago, military pilots who defected to Taiwan with their aircraft were given gold ingots.

In one celebrated case in 1987, a defecting pilot was awarded 5,000 taels (412 pounds of gold) worth more than $2 million and given a high post in the Taiwanese air force.

In another case in 1983, six Chinese hijackers seized an airliner and ordered the pilots to fly to South Korea.

The Taiwanese government successfully lobbied the South Korean government on behalf of the “Six Freedom Fighters” to have the hijackers brought to Taipei, where they were welcomed as heroes and given jobs and money.

That largess ended tragically when three of the “Freedom Fighters” several years later kidnaped the son of one of Taiwan’s richest men. They were caught and executed for their crime in 1990.

Signs that the Taiwan government’s attitude had begun to change first came in 1988, when two hijackers received a suspended 42-month sentence.

By the time that Shi and Yang, the hijackers interviewed, seized airplanes this fall, political tolerance for hijacking in Taiwan had ended.

“My impression is that the public opinion changed sometime in the middle of this summer,” a Western observer said. “The government found itself caught with an old policy and didn’t know what to do about it.”

Shi, an articulate, athletic-looking man who said he spent two days with the students in the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations at Tian An Men Square, got off the plane mouthing the politically correct language normally associated with hijacking across the Taiwan Strait.

“I want freedom,” Shi proclaimed to the corps of television cameras set up at the airport.

But by this time, the Taiwanese were not listening. Legislators condemned his crime. Not one public person lauded Shi’s “fight for freedom.” He was arrested, booked and quickly tried.

Last week, Shi sat nervously in a waiting room at the Taoyuan Detention Center, a clean, medium-security prison with 2,700 male and female inmates.

Occasionally, as he talked with a reporter, Shi broke into tears, waving his head violently in disbelief over his predicament. He said he expected that he might receive modest punishment for the hijacking. But he never expected a 12-year sentence.

“The judge told me the minimum is 12 years and four months,” he said forlornly.

“I’m disappointed now that I’m in Taiwan,” he said. “How can I fight for democracy and freedom when I don’t have freedom?”