After more than a year of review, the National Security Bureau on Monday said it has completed a sweeping declassification of political archives from the Martial Law period, transferring the full collection to the National Archives Administration under the National Development Council. The move marks another significant step in Taiwan’s long journey toward transitional justice.
The newly opened files span the architecture of authoritarian control: internal security and loyalty investigations, intelligence and counterintelligence operations, exit and entry controls, overseas surveillance of Taiwan independence activists, and case materials related to sedition and rebellion charges. For academics of Taiwan’s White Terror era — the decades-long period of political repression under the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) — this trove offers something long missing: primary-source documentation of how the system functioned.
For decades, public understanding of authoritarian-era surveillance and political trials has relied heavily on survivors’ testimonies and fragmentary historical records. Those voices have been indispensable, but they were often dismissed by skeptics demanding documentary proof. Now, with what authorities describe as a “not a single file withheld, not a single word redacted” release, history can be rigorously verified.
However, transparency does not automatically equal completeness. Questions remain about earlier archival practices — particularly the bundling or merging of files — that might have resulted in missing material. Declassification is not the final truth delivered in full. It is the beginning of a deeper inquiry.
The significance of opening these archives is not about settling scores. It is about clarifying how state power operated — and how it violated the rights of its citizens. Only by examining how institutions were structured to surveil, intimidate and punish can society fully grasp the cost of the democracy it now takes for granted. Transitional justice is not revenge; it is institutional self-understanding.
This wave of declassification is likely to spark renewed research across academia, journalism and civil society. It also serves as a reminder that history does not settle itself with time. Truth does not quietly sediment on its own. It must be persistently pursued, interrogated and contextualized.
Transitional justice begins with confronting the record. Taiwan has now opened another chapter.
Wang Hao is a political commentator.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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