Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Lai Jui-lung (賴瑞隆) yesterday said the China Youth Corps was complicit in censorship of the media during the Martial Law era, following the release of more details of an investigation by the Ill-gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee.
Lai’s remarks came after revelations that the organization’s official newsletter, Corps Affairs Information (團務通訊), had for many years carried a list of prohibited books compiled by the now-defunct Taiwan Garrison Command.
Although the corps has long presented itself as a youth organization, its real purpose was to serve the Taiwan Garrison Command as a proxy “thought police” on university campuses, Lai said.
Under former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), the organization was a “frontline combatant” in efforts to control society and suppress intellectual freedoms by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime, he said.
“That aesthetician Zhu Guangqian’sTwelve Letters to Youth (給青年的十二封信) was on the list of banned books proves that the China Youth Corps was inimical to enlightened thought,” Lai said.
During the Martial Law era, the organization performed ideological work, spread patriotic and anti-communist propaganda and cooperated with the military’s political warfare apparatus to impose thought control on university campuses, he said.
“On its path to democratic transition, the China Youth Corps must publicly apologize for its past deeds and return assets that it appropriated from the nation,” Lai said.
The investigation revealed that during the Martial Law era, the organization — then known as the China Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps — was specifically tasked with enforcing censorship, a committee member said on condition of anonymity.
The organization worked closely with the Taiwan Garrison Command to trace the circulation of prohibited books on campuses, the member said.
“The organization’s various university chapters and military instructors were virtually the Taiwan Garrison Command’s representatives on campuses,” the member said.
Back issues of the newsletter show a bewildering array of proscribed books, including Chinese classicist Yu Guan-ying’s (余冠英) Anthology of Tang Poems (唐詩選注), which was banned because Yu was allegedly a communist.
Titles published by publishing houses that did not obtain the KMT’s explicit approval were also banned, including political journals, Hong Kong-based writer Jin Yong’s (金庸) entire body of martial arts novels and the English-language book Small Arms of the World.
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