With the Kaohsiung Incident on Dec. 10, 1979, the lid was blown off the already-crumbling edifice of secrecy and dissembling built by the government. With the arrest of nearly the entire tangwai (non-KMT) leadership, the record of human rights failures in Taiwan was now a matter of public record.
But even with so many international organizations and individuals, including members of the US Congress, mobilized to defend the non-violent credentials of the Kaohsiung Eight, it was still of immense help to be able to say that Huang Hsin-chieh (黃信介), for example, was an Amnesty "prisoner of conscience." The Kaohsiung Incident marked the end of the decade as neatly as it did the closing of an important chapter in Taiwan's democratic development. Together, the democratic movement in Taiwan and the international human rights movement had made great strides in advancing their common cause.
Lynn Miles was co-founder of the International Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Taiwan and a member of the Japan section of Amnesty International during the 1970s.
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