What a coincidence that just a few days before today’s 28th anniversary of the death of Carnegie Mellon University Statistics professor Chen Wen-chen (陳文成), new evidence about the case should suddenly come to light.
Chen’s body was found on the campus of National Taiwan University on July 3, 1981, a day after he was taken away by Taiwan Garrison Command staff for questioning about his pro-democracy activities in the US.
At the time, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) authorities claimed Chen’s death was either suicide or an accident, but his family and others have long maintained that the former KMT government murdered him because of his political ideals. No real investigation into Chen’s death has ever been carried out and the truth remains a mystery.
Along with other unsolved White Terror era murders, such as the brutal killings of the family of former Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) in 1980, the death of Chen is a dark chapter in Taiwan’s history.
In the ensuing period, the Chen and Lin cases have become part of a macabre political circus, with DPP politicians occasionally bringing them up, only for the KMT to accuse them of exploiting the issue for electoral gain.
And while this may be true, the very fact that neither of these cases has ever been solved is the reason that the DPP is able to continue doing so.
While it is also true that during its eight years in power the DPP mostly talked of transitional justice and did not do enough to probe such cases, it is more plausible to believe that these files have long been hidden away and are only now seeing the light of day so they can help the present administration achieve certain aims.
Indeed, the discovery of the new files comes just three months after Minister of Justice Wang Ching-feng (王清峰) instructed prosecutors to set up a team to re-investigate Chen’s death and other cases.
Their discovery is all the more interesting because during past investigations, authorities had repeatedly said a written statement made by Chen and audiotapes of his interrogation had disappeared.
But Chen’s interrogation records were reportedly found by officials of the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office in the National Archives a few days ago. This begs the question that if the files were so easy to locate, why didn’t earlier probes uncover them?
Given his past 228 Massacre-related efforts, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has made no secret of the fact that he sees himself as the KMT’s “angel of reconciliation.” Any new light shed on such cases could help him cement this position.
But those who hope that one day someone will be brought to justice for these crimes will be disappointed, as doing so would undoubtedly compromise a number of senior KMT and military officials.
So unless the KMT has a major change of heart, the present circus will continue and the families of the victims will have to bear more shallow, half-hearted, stage-managed attempts at reconciliation.
The White House’s decision to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel Corp is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at US$20.47 a share last August, the US chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a US$43 billion return. One of the reasons the investment has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Howard personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients imaginable. They include Nvidia Corp, the company at the heart of the AI
A single photograph can cut through a lot of noise, but it can also be used to misrepresent the truth. At the very least, it can concentrate the mind on something that requires further investigation. On Monday last week, Ma Ying-jeou Foundation CEO Tai Hsia-ling (戴遐齡) and former National Security Council secretary-general King Pu-tsung (金溥聰) held a news conference in which they showed a photograph of former foundation CEO Hsiao Hsu-tsen (蕭旭岑), now Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) deputy chairman. In the image Hsiao is seated next to Xiamen Taiwan Businessmen Association chairman Han Ying-huan (韓螢煥). The two men were holding
I first met Professor Ray Jiing (井迎瑞) as a film and documentary student at Shih Hsin University’s (SHU) Department of Radio Television and Film in 1988. The following year, he went on to become the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archive — forerunner of the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (TFAI). Over his eight-year tenure, Jiing rescued and restored over 200 classic Taiwanese films. In 1997, he established the Graduate Institute of Studies in Documentary and Film Archiving at Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA), and I joined the program in his third cohort of students. Beyond a
President William Lai Ching-te’s (賴清德) May 20 second-anniversary address was not just a routine policy review; it was damage control. US President Donald Trump’s remarks — that he did not want to see anyone move toward independence and that the delivery of a major Taiwan arms package could depend on the progress of US-China relations — unsettled Taiwan’s public and created an opening for opposition parties to question whether Taiwan was being treated as a bargaining chip in Washington’s dealings with Beijing. Lai’s speech was designed to close that opening. The address covered the expected ground: sovereignty, cross-strait relations, defense spending,
RSS