In early October, three Taiwanese members of the I-Kuan Tao (一貫道) religious group aged in their 70s and 80s were arrested in Zhongshan, China. No one has heard from them since.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) said that the three were arrested on suspicion of “organizing and practicing as members of a cult that undermines law enforcement,” adding that they were arrested by police in Guangdong Province in accordance with the law. All three have hired lawyers.
The reason for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) arrests of the three I-Kuan Tao members is the same as the reason for the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) ban in the past. I-Kuan Tao used to be called the “duck egg cult” (鴨蛋教) because it was a group of ovo-vegetarians.
It was banned under the former KMT regime, which disparaged the group by propagandizing to the public that it was an evil cult whose members performed religious rites in the nude, making the public resistant to it.
In reality, I-Kuan Tao is considered a decent religion. The KMT regime belittled and banned it because the group was organized, and as authoritarian rule must stabilize its system, it prohibited people from holding assemblies and organizing themselves just to avoid the emergence of an armed democracy movement. The group broke the taboo of “being organized.”
The New Testament Church was also persecuted for being organized. It was a group of devout religious believers who were not at all involved in politics. However, they were persecuted by the KMT regime, and were eventually forced to fight against violence directed at them.
At that time, the first person who dared to call then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) a dictator was not a “dang wai” (黨外, “outside the KMT”) activist, but a New Testament Church member.
In the past few years, the New Testament Church has isolated itself from society, while ignoring the KMT. Ironically, I-Kuan Tao has become closer to the KMT. Perhaps it suffers from Stockholm syndrome.
The CCP and the former KMT regime are the “parties of brotherhood,” which prohibits people from assembly and organization just to stabilize their authoritarian rule.
The Falun Gong sect is also a normal fitness and religious group without political ideology, and yet it is still being persecuted by the CCP for being organized.
The two brother parties would not only strive to eliminate organized groups, but also ban public assemblies. The Falun Gong sect has been quite accommodating to the CCP up to this day.
In the US, the group has drawn a line between itself and pro-Taiwanese independence advocates. Even so, it has not received any understanding from the CCP, which would not let go of the well-organized I-Kuan Tao easily.
Taiwan has walked the path from authoritarianism to democracy in a bloodless revolution, and the “Quiet Revolution” of the late 1980s made Taiwanese proud.
However, there might be a misunderstanding: The former KMT regime’s control over people’s assembly and organization was so tight that they had no chance to launch an armed revolution. If not for the KMT’s 1984 assassination of Chinese-born American writer Henry Liu (劉宜良), who used the pen name Chiang Nan (江南) and whose case led to the downfall of the Chiang family’s hold on power, Taiwan might still be under authoritarian rule today, just like China.
Chen Mao-hsiung is chairman of the Society for the Promotion of Taiwanese Security.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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