Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) yesterday said that she considered the party’s past major objective of fangong dalu (反攻大陸) — literally “retaking Mainland China through military action” — as “something funny.” However, millions of people suffered throughout their entire lives to achieve this “funny” objective. Therefore, the KMT owes the nation an apology for it.
Following its defeat by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its retreat to Taiwan, the KMT placed the nation under martial law from 1949 to 1987, calling it the “period of mobilization for the suppression of Communist rebellion.” The Martial Law era put every aspect of people’s lives under tight control and kept them under close watch. Any doubt regarding the ultimate objective of fangong dalu was considered treason.
A leading figure in the Taiwanese independence movement, former presidential adviser Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), for instance, was affected by Martial Law era policy.
Despite being trusted by the KMT leadership and received by Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), Peng said that he developed dissidence against the KMT regime because he realized that achieving fangong dalu was not possible. In 1964, as a political science professor at National Taiwan University, Peng and two students published A Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation (台灣人民自救宣言), proposing that, since retaking China was not possible, Taiwan should establish itself as a separate nation with a new, democratic constitution.
Because of his ideas, Peng became a political prisoner and later went into exile until 1992.
Huang Kuang-hai (黃廣海), formerly with the Republic of China Air Force, was another who was affected. Huang was a native of Guangdong Province in China and retreated to Taiwan with the KMT troops. However, he was arrested and sentenced to life in prison for “spreading baseless rumors to sway the morale of the public,” because he wrote in several letters to friends in Hong Kong that it was impossible for the KMT to retake China.
Millions of other lives were affected by the objective of fangong dalu during the Martial Law period.
It is estimated that between 1 million and 2 million people — including soldiers and civilians — retreated to Taiwan following the KMT’s defeat. Many of them had left their loved ones behind and believed that they might be able to return home soon, as the KMT government would quickly retake China.
Because of this belief, many of them decided not to marry — or not to remarry — and therefore, today there are still many low-ranking KMT veterans in their 80s or 90s living alone and in poverty.
In an exclusive interview with the Taipei Times, a former court martial judge, Kao Ping-han (高秉涵), said that when serving as a judge in Kinmen during the Martial Law period, he once had to sentence a young soldier to death because he tried to swim from Kinmen to Xiamen in China.
After handing down the verdict, he asked the young man if he had anything to say.
He said that he was a native of Xiamen and was forcibly recruited into the military when he was returning home after buying medicine for his ill mother. Since he was able to see his village from Kinmen every day, he wanted to swim back to see his mother.
He told Kao where he kept the medicine and said: “If you succeed in retaking China one day, please deliver the medicine to my mother.”
The young man never had a chance to learn that there was to be no more “retaking China” and that the current KMT presidential candidate considers it “something funny.”
It is no laughing matter, though, for those who believed in it or did not.
Should not the KMT apologize for it?
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