Former commander-in-chief of the Republic of China Army Sun Li-jen (孫立人) was exonerated by the Control Yuan yesterday of a coup d’etat charge dating from 1955, a charge that led to him being detained under house arrest in Taipei for 33 years.
The general fell into disfavor with then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) amid rumors that the US wanted to see Sun replace Chiang.
One of Sun’s officers, Major Kuo Ting-liang (郭廷亮) was arrested in 1955 and tortured into writing a confession that he had been spying for the People’s Republic of China.
Kuo’s confession was then used by Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), who was then head of the secret police, as the basis for charges that Sun had harbored communist spies and was plotting a coup d’etat.
Sun was arrested and court-martialed in August 1955. Found guilty, he was placed under house arrest, where he remained until March 1988, following the death of Chiang Ching-kuo, even though Kuo later said he had been coerced into writing the confession and falsifying its date.
The latest Control Yuan probe into the Sun case was led by Lee Ping-nan (李炳南) and lasted a two-and-a-half years.
Lee twice visited the US to examine Chiang Kai-shek diaries archived in the Stanford University Library, and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of documents and original papers from the military’s Political Affairs Department, the Investigation Bureau and the National Archives Administration.
Lee released a report on the probe yesterday that supported Kuo’s claim of torture.
“Kuo was forced to confess under torture and coercion, which took place somewhere between July 9 to 20 [1955]. This can be verified from Chiang Kai-shek’s diary,” Lee said. “But the military forced Kuo to falsely date the confession June 6, 1955. The date was left blank, and was filled in later.”
“Findings from the investigation can exonerate General Sun. It can be proven that Kuo was not a spy, but his confession was forced and falsified,” Lee said.
Sun was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute. He led his New 38th Division troops to battle victories over the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma during World War II, and was respected by US and British commanders. He became commander-in-chief of the army in 1950. However, Sun was frequently at odds with Chiang Kai-shek’s plan to launch a military invasion “to take back the mainland” from the communists.
After Sun’s arrest in 1955, Chiang Kai-shek appointed a nine-man commission, headed by then-vice president Chen Cheng (陳誠), to investigate the matter. The Control Yuan formed its own five-man commission to investigate.
The nine-man commission declared Kuo guilty of spying and using his relationship with Sun to conspire against the ROC government. However, the Control Yuan’s commission concluded Sun and Kuo had only been preparing a report for Chiang Kai-shek outlining measures to reform the military. It found no evidence of a coup conspiracy.
However, the complete records of that Control Yuan report were only made public in 2001, Lee said.
Sun’s relatives, along with people in military circles and academia, have pressed the government for decades to clear Sun’s name.
Lee said his investigation had found that Kuo was arrested on May 25, 1955, and tortured for more than 10 days, but would not confess.
“Later the military used other ways and inducements to entice Kuo, and thus produced the ‘confession letter’ in which he admitted spying for communist China, and the date was filled in afterwards,” Lee said.
However, Lee said that his investigation showed Kuo was a victim, but had also benefited from his cooperation with the military because his family received a NT$500 monthly stipend from the government.
The fallout from the charges against Sun in 1955 led to the arrest and imprisonment of more than 300 people by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government.
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