The occupation of the Legislative Yuan by the Sunflower movement is over. As President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration regroups, what repercussions there will be for those involved remains to be seen, just as we are yet to find out how much government transparency there will be over the cross-strait service trade agreement.
Both are issues to watch. One thing is clear, however: Taiwan has come a long way and is a different nation from that of the Sunflowers’ immediate ancestors. From the end of World War II (1945) to the lifting of martial law (1987) the nation had to endure both the White Terror era and the one-party state of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
How bad and how autocratic was this period? Four pivotal books, one for each decade, tell the story of the struggles, suffering and deaths that nourished the soil out of which the Sunflower movement grew.
Formosa Betrayed by George Kerr is the first. It deals with the period immediately after the 228 Incident in 1947 and documents the brutality, murders and corruption of the KMT rulers as they first exploited Taiwan and then were forced to retreat here permanently. We see the extent of the killings in the “March massacre,” the broken promises and treachery of Chen Yi (陳儀), who ironically would later be executed not so much for what he did in Taiwan, as for planning to switch sides to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
All this brutality was evident in reports received by the US, which did not shine in the dilemma, as Washington supported the brutal and undemocratic regime of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). The information was there, but went unheeded.
The repressive climate of the 1950s, especially in the nation’s prisons, is found in Tehpen Tsai’s (蔡德本 ) Elegy of Sweet Potatoes: Stories of Taiwan’s White Terror (蕃薯仔哀歌). This award-winning semi-autobiographical work has been published in three languages — Japanese, Chinese and English. Tsai was arrested in 1954, one month after he had returned to Taiwan from a one-year grant he had received to study in the US. He would spend the next year and one month in prison trying to prove his innocence. Here one comes to understand prison life and the saying that 100 were killed rather than allow one communist to escape. The Leninist method of interrogation used, replete with forced biographies, cast a wide net implicating many intentionally as well as unintentionally.
Too many innocent people, both Mainlanders as well as ethnic Taiwanese, would have their lives disrupted or ruined during this period.
The 1960s have a different flavor in A Taste of Freedom (自由的滋味) by Peng Ming-min (彭明敏). Peng, Taiwanese by birth, was initially favored and groomed for higher office by Chiang’s regime. Peng could have risen to a high position in the ranks of the KMT had he not attempted to publish a manifesto for Taiwanese democracy and freedom, for which he was arrested in 1964.
He was lucky not to be tortured, unlike his two student accomplices. His dramatic escape to Sweden in early 1970 is covered in the latter part of the book.
Little detail is given of the escape in order to protect those who assisted him, since the work was originally written when martial law was still in effect. This work focuses more on the development of Peng’s democratic beliefs, from his early education in Japan to becoming chairman of the political science department at National Taiwan University, up to the period of his arrest.
The fourth book, A Borrowed Voice, Taiwan Human Rights through International Networks, 1960-1980, overlaps the previous period and takes the reader up to the pivotal Kaohsiung Incident of 1979 and the subsequent trials. This aggregate work, written and edited by Linda Gail Arrigo and Lynn Miles, includes personal accounts of 20-plus supporters of human rights during that time.
What makes this work so crucial is that most of the people, Taiwanese and foreigners, are still living and involved in Taiwanese politics and democracy. Many were blacklisted by the KMT government until the early 1990s. This is a period where we see how Amnesty International, from outside the country, helped force open Taiwan’s windows and let the light of human rights shine in.
The harshness of the one-party state could no longer be hidden. Taiwanese were still suffering, but their plight was increasingly understood by the outside world.
The Martial Law era and the KMT’s one-party state officially ended in 1987. Free legislative elections and the disbanding of the Taiwan Garrison Command occurred in 1992. In 1996, the president was, for the first time, elected by the public.
This was the period when those who would later form the Sunflower movement were just entering the world.
An irony not widely known is that many KMT stalwarts who had supported former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) with his so-called “three noes” policy — no contact, no negotiation, no compromise with the People’s Republic of China — now trip and fall over each other as they rush to make profits in China.
There are many books on this era, but in reading these four works as a composite of four decades one gains a sense of the many lives that were ruined in Taiwan.
Much of what is detailed in these books happened before the Sunflowers were born, but the rights that were at issue are those they are fighting for now.
These books do not represent ancient history, but immediate history. They show the price that was paid and the blood that was shed to nourish the soil of Taiwanese democracy. Knowingly or not, this is the soil that the Sunflowers were nourished in and strive to protect.
The books raise many questions: Who are the real heroes both from the past and the present? Who are those that profited both then and now? Who are the real criminals still walking the streets?
There are innumerable questions, including why is the KMT not just the richest party in Taiwan, but perhaps even one of the richest in the world? Ma was nurtured, as was Peng, but he turned out differently. Will he write a book? Perspective is sought on all these questions, and also on the events of the immediate past. It may be found in former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) The Road to Democracy, Taiwan’s Pursuit of Identity (台灣的主張), written near the end of Lee’s presidency in 1999.
One wonders, in light of recent events, if perhaps it is the Sunflowers and not Ma who have become the real “new Taiwanese” that Lee wrote of in that book.
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei.
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