The daughter of a prominent Taiwanese communist killed during the White Terror era on Tuesday voiced her opposition to the so-called “1992 consensus.”
“My dad was a communist and I am against the ‘1992 consensus’ because of its ‘one China’ framework ... any ‘1992 consensus’ under the ‘one country, two systems formula’ is absolutely unacceptable to me,” Lan Yun-jo (藍芸若), the daughter of Lan Ming-ku (藍明谷), said at a promotional event for the Green Island Human Rights Arts Festival.
Lan Ming-ku was born in what is now Kaohsiung’s Gangshan District (岡山) in 1919. After living in China in his youth, he returned home to teach at the then-Taiwan Provincial Keelung Senior High School, where he met Chung Hao-tung (鍾浩東), the school’s principal and a secret communist activist.
Lan Ming-ku became a member of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Keelung Work Committee and a writer for The Light (光明報), an underground leftist journal.
In 1949, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government cracked down on The Light and the CCP’s organization in Keelung. Lang Ming-ku was apprehended in 1951 and executed without trial. He was 32.
Lan Yun-jo, 67, said that she was just one year old when her mother was imprisoned on Green Island (綠島) and served a one-year sentence for failing to report a communist agent.
Lan Yun-jo said she grew up hearing that her father was a “bandit spy” and the discrimination against her family made her feel insecure later in life, even though she graduated from National Tainan Girls’ Senior High School and National Taiwan University, before becoming a high-school teacher like her father.
“I was in my 40s when people finally told me that my father ‘did great things,’ and I came to understand that he put his faith in the CCP because he despaired of the KMT’s corruption and wanted to change things,” she said.
She said her father was not the only one in the family who joined the CCP and her uncle still lives in China today.
However, the uncle changed his name to Lee Ho-ming (李河民) to avoid causing harm to his Taiwanese relatives and he later became a celebrated vaccine expert and the director of China’s National Institute of Biological Product Control.
The CCP held an event in Lee’s honor on April 23 in Beijing and invited Lan Yun-jo to attend because of her father’s symbolic importance in the party’s history.
During the event, a former deputy governor of China’s Fujian Province lobbied her to support “Taiwan’s return to the motherland” and the “1992 consensus,” she said.
Lan Yun-jo said she asked him if he meant unification under the “one China, two systems” framework and he said yes.
“Never,” she told him.
Although she frequently visits China, and understands that China and Taiwan are two different entities, “it will take a long time for me to warm to China,” she said.
“For example, China recently bullied us at the WHA [World Health Assembly] and this kind of behavior makes me very angry,” she said.
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