Once hailed as the ROC's "anti-communist patriots" for hijacking a Chinese passenger plane from China to South Korea in 1983, Zhuo Changren (
The six hijackers of the Chinese plane, with Zhuo as their leader, were detained, prosecuted, convicted and jailed in South Korea for a year and three months before being quietly sent to Taiwan in August of 1984. The Taiwan government went all out supporting them, even hiring defense attorneys for them in South Korea.
The ruckus over the Los Angeles Olympic Games provided the necessary smoke screen. Out of a worship of "anti-communist patriots," the colonial-style KMT regime which then governed Taiwan with an iron fist hailed them as "heros," rather than "hijackers."
The day after their arrival in Taiwan, they were received by then president Chiang Ching-kuo (
Ironically, as a result of such privileged treatment for their "patriotism," Zhuo and Jiang came to think only of themselves. They felt that Taiwan owed them, partly because, compared with Chinese pilots who directly defected to Taiwan in fighter jets, the reward money Zhuo and Jiang received was on the small side.
Coming from China's socialist "paradise," they were like helpless infants in Taiwan's capitalistic society. They had no concept of saving or investment and their money was quickly spent. After Zhuo lost all his money in investments, he decided to teamed up with Jiang to commit a kidnapping for ransom.
The two men's executions came after more than nine years of appeals against their sentences. While their executions were anticipated, they are nevertheless thought-provoking. One cannot help but ask what good has been accomplished from Taiwan's adherence to anti-communism and the price that has had to be paid for it. As a buttress of the KMT's ugly martial law regime, it wrecked many more lives than those of these two kidnappers. We can only hope that the execution of these two men means that the curtain has finally fallen on Taiwan's anti-communist farce.
After Zhuo and Jiang were sentenced to death, politics continued to meddle with criminal justice. Sung Hsin-lien (宋心濂), then chief of the National Security Bureau, visited them in detention. (Sung had been the first high-ranking intelligence official appointed by Chiang Ching-kuo to visit them in South Korea in 1983.) Sung instructed the Ministry of Justice to delay their execution. What an irony that after they received a death sentence, the prosecutor in the case Chu Chen-pei (邱鎮北) was arrested and convicted on corruption charges. One wonders how a corrupt prosecutor could have impartially dealt with such a highly political case. Later, a judge contacted another of the six hijackers to tell him that he had evidence to prove that Zhuo had been tortured by the prosecutor. The judge had hoped the man would come to Zhuo and Jiang's defense, but the request was rejected.
Nobody looks good in this case. Certainly the executed men were no angels. But politics and criminal justice became tangled up and anti-communist fever actually took priority over universally accepted values. The slogan used to be that that fighting against communism was no sin under any circumstances, a belief which was not only contemptibly vindictive but, as one might expect from the Chiang family, amazingly stupid, resulting as it did in Taiwan's isolation from the world community.
Zhuo and Jiang left the world on Friday. Let us hope that the anti-communist fervor that has caused so much grief in Taiwan went with them.
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
Father’s Day, as celebrated around the world, has its roots in the early 20th century US. In 1910, the state of Washington marked the world’s first official Father’s Day. Later, in 1972, then-US president Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing the third Sunday of June as a national holiday honoring fathers. Many countries have since followed suit, adopting the same date. In Taiwan, the celebration takes a different form — both in timing and meaning. Taiwan’s Father’s Day falls on Aug. 8, a date chosen not for historical events, but for the beauty of language. In Mandarin, “eight eight” is pronounced
US President Donald Trump’s alleged request that Taiwanese President William Lai (賴清德) not stop in New York while traveling to three of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, after his administration also rescheduled a visit to Washington by the minister of national defense, sets an unwise precedent and risks locking the US into a trajectory of either direct conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or capitulation to it over Taiwan. Taiwanese authorities have said that no plans to request a stopover in the US had been submitted to Washington, but Trump shared a direct call with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平)
It is difficult to think of an issue that has monopolized political commentary as intensely as the recall movement and the autopsy of the July 26 failures. These commentaries have come from diverse sources within Taiwan and abroad, from local Taiwanese members of the public and academics, foreign academics resident in Taiwan, and overseas Taiwanese working in US universities. There is a lack of consensus that Taiwan’s democracy is either dying in ashes or has become a phoenix rising from the ashes, nurtured into existence by civic groups and rational voters. There are narratives of extreme polarization and an alarming
RSS