Recently declassified National Security Bureau files showed that the former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime was keeping close tabs on Formosa Magazine and learned the entire content of its first issue before it went to print.
Formosa Magazine was at the center of 1979’s Kaohsiung Incident, also known as the Formosa Incident.
The magazine organized a pro-democracy demonstration on Dec. 10, 1979. It was intended to commemorate Human Rights Day.
Photo provided by the Transitional Justice Commission
The event turned violent when members of the crowd unknown to the organizers — and widely believed to have been provocateurs — began attacking police. The KMT authorities used the Incident as an excuse to arrest virtually all well-known opposition leaders.
Tuesday is the 40th anniversary of the Kaohsiung Incident.
The commission on Friday said that it has been in contact with the bureau since the Political Archives Act (政治檔案條例) was passed, in the hope of obtaining declassified files about the Incident.
The commission said that it worked closely with several agencies to facilitate the declassification and transfer of data about state-perpetrated injustice during the White Terror era.
At first it was not easy, as all files on the Kaohsiung Incident had been permanently classified, the commission said.
Thanks to assistance from the Presidential Office and National Security Council, the classified documents eventually saw the light of day, it said.
The data detailed how the then-KMT government surveilled Formosa Magazine from when it was founded to the publication of its first issue, the commission said, adding that the magazine was being so closely monitored that the KMT knew the entire content of its first issue before it went to print, including the layout of its inside pages.
In the few months of the short-lived magazine’s life, intelligence agencies had embedded informants in the magazine’s office to monitor every move, the commission said.
The declassified data also offered insight into the KMT’s decisionmaking process after the Kaohsiung Incident, including its choice to round up the activists and quash dissents, all of which was missing from previously released information, the commission said.
The information would shed new light on the Incident once it is made available to the public, it added.
The National Archives Administration in 2002 began collecting data on the Incident, and last year began its sixth wave of data collection, sourcing data from the National Security Bureau, the National Police Agency and the Investigation Bureau, the commission said.
A substantial portion of the most recent data showed that many non-governmental entities had been acting on the orders of intelligence agencies and feeding them information about the magazine, it said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS