April 2 to April 8
Chou Shen-yuan (周慎源) was fortunate he knew judo. The president of National Taiwan Normal University’s (NTNU) student union used his skills to push aside the two secret police and jump off the rickshaw they had forced him onto. The police gave chase and fired warning shots, but retreated after other students appeared after hearing the ruckus.
This was just the prelude to the main event.
Photo courtesy of WIkimedia Commons
In the wee hours of April 6, 1949, the military police entered NTNU and National Taiwan University (NTU), demanding that they hand over Chou and 13 other student leaders charged with a long string of White Terror-era offenses. The students refused, and after a long stand-off, the soldiers took action.
Hundreds of students were captured, and while most were eventually released, seven allegedly died in prison while a handful were formally charged. More than 30 were expelled.
NO POLICE VIOLENCE
Photo: Taipei Times File
It all began on March 20, 1949, when two students from NTU and NTNU were stopped by the police for riding on the same bicycle. A conflict erupted, and the students were beaten and arrested.
The next day, about 300 NTNU students marched toward the police station, singing loudly along the way. NTU students heard the singing and joined in, swelling the numbers to 500.
The students demanded the release of their classmates and for the Taipei City police commissioner Liu Chien-lieh (劉堅烈) to apologize. The students were released and the police department sent a representative to diffuse the situation, but the protesters refused to talk to anyone but the commissioner.
Photo courtesy of NTNU
After waiting until 3am, the students went home and the next morning marched directly towards the Taipei City Police Department headquarters, still singing loudly and writing on cars with chalk slogans such as “no police violence” and “safeguard our personal freedom.”
Under pressure, Liu signed the paper with the students’ demands and promised that he would run an apology in the newspapers and deal with the offending officers.
Things did not end there. On March 29, the students held a campfire party to celebrate Youth Day. After singing songs that were popular during the student movements in China, the leaders announced the formation of the Taipei City Student Union, with the aim of “fighting for the right to survive, ending hunger and oppression and attaining democracy and freedom.”
Historian Lan Po-chou (藍博洲) writes in The Sky is Still Dark (天未亮) that by then, the authorities were convinced that these students could not have put together such an organized movement on their own without any prior experience. They also believed that the development of events were very similar to the methods used by the Chinese Communist Party.
“Once the nature of the student movement was decided, government suppression would not be far behind,” Lan writes.
It didn’t help that pro-CCP student protests against the civil war were also taking place in Nanjing, which ended in violence. Taiwan Provincial Governor Chen Cheng (陳誠) was furious at the turn of events in Taiwan, and was determined to keep Taiwan “stable” as the situation in China worsened.
SHOWDOWN ON CAMPUS
The government had hoped to arrest the 14 targets individually on April 5, as the students would likely be on their own on the Qingming Festival (清明節), more commonly known as Tomb Sweeping Festival. But Chou’s failed arrest put the students on alert, and the military police moved on to phase two of the operation.
The presidents of the two schools met with Chen and other authorities imploring them not to deploy the military and not to use force.
The NTNU students barricaded themselves in the school, refusing to hand over the targeted individuals to the military despite repeated pleas by interim president Hsieh Tung-min (謝東閔).
The soldiers struck at dawn, taking away hundreds of students from both NTNU and NTU. Right after the operation, Chen publicly criticized the lack of discipline in the schools, vowing to rectify the situation so such an incident wouldn’t happen again.
The state-run Central Daily News on April 7 chimed in with an editorial.
“Recently, a small number of students have been influenced by the arrogant attitudes brought from China, and have tried to start student movements that have disrupted public order,” it stated. “If we let this continue, Taiwan’s stability will surely come to an end. For the sake of all people in Taiwan, the government must take the necessary means to suppress undesirable behavior and attitudes.”
Former NTNU student Tu Ping-lang (涂炳榔) recalls in a government-sponsored oral history that campus life was “very free” before the April 6 Incident. Under government-appointed principal Liu Chen (劉真), all students had to re-register for school with mandatory assemblies every morning (before students only went to campus if they had class) with military instructors calling roll for every single class.
The arrests continued, as Tu says that many of his classmates would be taken away or simply “disappear” throughout the following years, including himself — during the first semester of his senior year, he was sentenced to 10 years in jail for participating in left-learning student meetings two summers previously.
In May 1950, Lan writes, more than 40 students from both schools were taken away. Nineteen of them were executed while the others received lengthy sentences.
As for Chou, who avoided capture twice, he joined China’s communist party and was reportedly shot by government agents in 1952.
“The April 6 Incident uprooted the students’ idealism, and they dared not speak of politics again,” writes witness Chang Kuang-chih (張光直) in his memoir.
Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that have anniversaries this week.
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