Thu, Mar 23, 2000 page9

• Completing the circle

  A scholar who came to Taiwan over 30 years ago to study recalls the people and events that have marked this country's painful casting off of the politics of terror and intimidation to embrace democracy and freedom

  • By Bruce Jacobs
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  When I first came to Taiwan in 1965 to study as a graduate student in Chinese history at National Taiwan University, Taiwan was an economically impoverished and politically dreary environment. In 1992, when I first returned to Taiwan after 12 years on the blacklist, Antonio Chiang (江春男), the publisher and editor in chief of this newspaper, wrote in The Journalist (新新聞) that I was " part of Taiwan history." This sounds dramatic, but such prominence came at considerable costs.

  During the past 35 years I have had the opportunity to see enormous changes in Taiwan politics and, involuntarily, my life became intertwined with some of these events. Thus, when observing the recent presidential election, I felt divided into two separate persons.

  The scholar, who seeks to evaluate events, trends and results objectively, wrote the analyses which appeared in this newspaper on March 15th, 16th, 19th and 20th.

  

  The other person has many memories and emotions. During campaign rallies and meetings, he recalled some happiness, much sadness and occasionally shed a tear. He, of course, helped remind the scholar of the momentous nature and importance of the election, but today his fingers are pressing the computer keys.

  I first began to study Taiwan politics in 1969 as a postgraduate student at Columbia University and published my first article, "Recent Leadership and Political Trends in Taiwan" in The China Quarterly (January-March 1971). Over the next several years, several academic and journalistic articles followed. Enlightened leaders in Taiwan realized that objective analyses were much more helpful to Taiwan than propaganda tomes, which painted Taiwan as all-white or all-black, and I received considerable assistance in meeting a wide variety of senior party and government leaders.

  At the time I came under "police protection" in 1980, there were widespread perceptions that I only had links to the opposition and DPP. During their investigations, the police were quite surprised by the number of prominent government and party leaders in my business card books, and by the number who vouched for me despite the dangerous times.

  Prior to 1979, the Government Information Office had been particularly helpful in arranging appointments and over several years I had met each of the directors of GIO. When I arrived in May 1979 for a short research trip, the then new, young director of the GIO, James Soong (宋楚瑜), was too busy to meet with a then young academic. The GIO also suddenly seemed unable to arrange appointments.

  Into the gap came a young woman, Chen Chu (陳菊). When she discovered that I only knew a few of the opposition leaders, she immediately arranged that I meet virtually all of the rest. Thus, while I was waiting for Soong's office to arrange appointments, I met such people as Shih Ming-teh (施明德), who was just out of prison, Yao Chia-wen (姚嘉文), Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) and Annette Lu (呂秀蓮).

  When I next came to Taiwan in January 1980, many of these friends were already in jail following the Kaohsiung Incident of Dec. 10, 1979. I went to the GIO and expressed my concern about the people in jail and even asked to visit them. Despite this brashness, GIO helped arrange some appointments with senior government and party leaders as well as visits to the Ten Key Infrastructure Projects (十大建設), though Director Soong himself remained too busy for a meeting. I also met many more members of the opposition and many of their families.

  Later, when the Kaohsiung Incident trials began, Director Soong served as the mouthpiece of the repressive regime and frequently attacked the western press for its reports. Several members of both the foreign and Taiwan press commented privately that he mainly attacked female correspondents and that he lacked the guts to go after the men.

  I had heard rumors that Lin I-hsiung was being tortured in prison and learned that Fang Su-min (方素敏), Lin's wife, had been to see him in prison. At noon, on Feb. 28, 1980, a day seared onto Taiwan history like original 228 (Feb. 28, 1947), I tried to ring Fang to learn how Lin was. Her youngest daughter, Ting-chun (亭均), answered the phone and said her mother and grandmother were away. We chatted a bit and I said I would try to come over that night to play "riding the horse" with them. I said good-bye, but she said "my sister wants to talk to you." So I chatted with her older twin sister, Liang-chun (亮均), too.

  Then I went and bought a box lunch, ate in my room and prepared for my afternoon interviews with Tao Pai-chien (陶百川) and Lien Chen-tung (連震東), the father of Lien Chan (連戰). Tao and I discussed the constitution, the law codes and the roles of the Control Yuan, while Lien and I talked about the KMT Reform of 1950-1952 and his activities on the mainland during the Japanese colonial period. I knew both of them from earlier interviews and Tao later played a critical role in persuading President Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) to allow my release.

  That night, after I returned from the interviews, I shared some premium scotch with an American historian. I rang Fang Su-min, but was told she was not home. I asked when she would return, but the male voice said he did not know, "something has happened in the family." At the time I did not think anything serious had occurred and continued to drink the scotch, which was extremely rare in Taiwan at the time. Then, after some 10 minutes, I felt I had better go and walked over to the house. It was about 6 pm and dark outside. Large numbers of police and reporters were in front of the house. No one would tell me what had happened and I couldn't get into the house. Finally, one person told me Fang Su-min was in the Jenai Hospital (仁愛醫院) and I ran there.

  At the hospital Kang Ning-hsiang (康寧祥) told me that Auntie Lim (林阿嬤) and the two twins, Liang-chun and Ting-chun, were dead, that Huan-chun (奐均), the Lin's nine-year old daughter, was in surgery and that Fang was under sedation. Many people at the hospital said that the security agencies had killed the Lin family, but I replied, "That's impossible, they couldn't be so stupid."

  My own theories at the time included a crazy person inflamed by the hatred against the opposition which the media had generated, a professional sent in by China to create instability, and, if the security agencies were involved, a subordinate who took too literally a superior's vague statement like "we must take care of these bastards." Of course, now that the case has remained officially unsolved for more than 20 years and with such successive mysteries as the Chen Wen-cheng (陳文成) case in 1981 and the 1985 Henry Liu (江南) case in the US (where we know security agencies were involved), I believe that my initial reaction was probably flawed.

  On 1 March 1980, The United Daily News (聯合報) reported that a foreigner with a beard was under suspicion. The next day, a Sunday, the United Daily News further reported that the foreigner had a PhD from Columbia University. At that time, Taipei was still not an international metropolis and beards were uncommon. Since it was during the northern hemisphere academic year, I was likely the only foreigner who matched these conditions. I rang the homes of two deputy directors of departments at the KMT Central Party Headquarters and asked what I should do. Both recommended calling the Detective Bureau (刑事警察局), which I did. They didn't seem interested, but said I could come if I wanted. (I had thought they would be interested in the timing of my telephone talks with the twins as I was probably the last person to speak to them, even if it was over the telephone.) That afternoon, I "walked into the tiger's lair" and was placed under police "protection." A few days later I underwent a 24-hour interrogation in a "safe house." For the next 11 weeks, until President Chiang Ching-kuo personally gave approval, I could not leave Taiwan. Then, unbeknownst to me, I was placed on the blacklist for 12 years.

  This history kept flooding back to me as I observed the recent presidential campaign. Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) had only really joined the opposition as a member of the legal defense team and I did not meet him until the early 1990s when he was a member of the Legislative Yuan. Our first long talk occurred in mid-1998 when he invited me to the mayoral office for a chat. He wanted to use his mayoral powers to see if progress could be made towards solving the Lin family murder case. A-bian clearly believes that the security agencies arranged the maiming of his wife, Wu Shu-chen (吳淑珍).

  I have known Annette Lu for over 20 years and came to know her better during a conference she organized in 1998 on peaceful co-existence between China and Taiwan when several of us also spent time with her in her native Taoyuan. When she spoke during the campaign, I admired her logical speeches, but I also remembered the young woman who helped found the women's movement in Taiwan and who nearly died from cancer during her imprisonment.

  Hsu Hsin-liang (許信良) is also an old friend whom I met at his famous "birthday party" demonstration in May 1979 when he was County Executive of Taoyuan. For his "birthday party," 10,000 people peacefully demonstrated in Chungli less than two years after the Chungli Incident (中壢事件), which had led to the burning down of a major police station. Later we had many discussions both in the US in the early 1980s and in Taipei during the 1990s. I valued his sobriety, and was saddened that he felt the need to leave the DPP, where he could have still made major contributions, to run his quixotic campaign for the presidency.

  I had never formally met Lien Chan, though we had nodded at each other in the same room when he was provincial governor. At the time, I thought he was shy. When he spoke during campaign rallies and a visit to a temple in the countryside, I found myself thinking more of his modest -- and important -- father rather than the nervous, wooden campaigner with a reputation for arrogance before me.

  After a breakfast with Vincent Siew (蕭萬長) and several foreign businessmen, I had come away with good impressions. However, when he later won his seat in the Legislative Yuan in 1995, I was very aware that he had achieved his electoral victory only with the assistance of the Siew Family Squad (蕭家班), one of the "blackest" political groupings in contemporary Taiwan. During the presidential campaign, I saw banners calling for Chiayi people to support Siew as a Chiayi native, and I was curious to see if he would lift the KMT ticket there. In the event the KMT ticket did very poorly in both Chiayi City and Chiayi County, so the Siew Family Squad, with one leader in detention for blackmail and bribery, did not prove effective in obtaining votes.

  For the reasons mentioned earlier dating back some two decades, my feelings towards James Soong were quite negative, though I acknowledge that he made a major contribution in opposing the old, conservative mainlander elite when he supported President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) for the KMT chairmanship after Chiang Ching-kuo's death in January 1988. When he spoke at campaign rallies and on television, the word "hypocrite" kept coming to mind.

  Soong said he would democratize, but he had staunchly defended the authoritarian regime during its most repressive days. He said he would clean up the KMT, but as KMT secretary-general and provincial governor he had helped consolidate "black and gold" politics. He said a vote for A-bian would lead to war because A-bian supported Taiwanese Independence, but then announced that Taiwan is an "independent, sovereign state."

  Soong's supporters also worried me. Too many admitted that Soong had pocketed money (A-錢) as KMT secretary-general and provincial governor, but said it didn't matter because county and township executives had pocketed more.

  I also found the intensity of his campaign rallies disturbing. Perhaps unfairly (and certainly many people in Taiwan have misused such comparisons), I sensed a fervor among his true believers that seemed to resemble Hitler's rallies in Weimar Germany.

  All of these memories and emotions came full circle as I stood in the mud at the Chungshan Soccer Stadium on election eve. Chen Chu was on stage keeping the crowd's attention as she presided over the rally. I had to wipe the corners of my eyes when DPP chairman Lin I-hsiung and three former chairmen, Shih Ming-teh, Yao Chia-wen and Chang Chun-hung (張俊宏), all spoke briefly and remained on stage. Someone noted that the four had decades of prison experience between them, and I reflected how unreal and distant this must have seemed to the large numbers of young people in the crowd who had grown up in the much freer environment of the 1990s.

  Fang Su-min told the crowd that 12 days earlier Lin Huan-chun had given birth to a daughter and that she and Lin I-hsiung were now grandparents. I remembered the last time I saw Huan-chun, a nine-year old in hospital recovering from her wounds under police guard, and how she seemed pleased that her "foreign uncle" had come to pay a visit. And I remembered the brave doctors and nurses who told me that it was not true that Huan-chun had said that she knew the assailant who left her for dead and killed her sisters and grandmother.

  At the end of the rally, I moved forward towards the stage and caught Chen Chu's eye. Rather than give her the thumbs up, which had become a gesture for Candidate No. 1, I raised my hand, five fingers outstretched, and waved. (Chen was the No. 5 candidate.) With five outstretched fingers, she waved back.

  Taiwanese finish a banquet with a warm sweet soup of round glutinous rice balls to indicate a well-rounded conclusion to the meal. Twenty-one years after Chen Chu had introduced me to many members of the opposition, the circle had finally been satisfactorily completed with two much older people waving to each other with five outstretched fingers.

  The journey to complete the circle had involved much courage, much suffering and many losses. Even today I cannot think of Auntie Lim, Liang-chun and Ting-chun without tears coming to my eyes. But my own pain of being forcibly separated from my family in Australia for three months in 1980 and from the land and people of my "second home" for 12 years is little compared to the pain and suffering which DPP leaders underwent, ordeals well beyond the comprehension of most of us. Yet, they bear little bitterness and Shih Ming-teh, who is truly Taiwan's Mandela, still acts strongly and positively to promote reconciliation and brotherhood despite his 20 years of imprisonment, loss of family and loss of health.

  This journey of courage and suffering has finally borne fruit. With the peaceful transfer of central government power to the opposition, Taiwan has solidified its democracy and entered a new stage with government of, by and for the people. This process has created strong emotions in many people over a very long time. That is why, when the victory of Chen Shui-bian and Annette Lu became clear on the night of 18 March, the face of this objective scholar broke into huge smiles and why he embraced his friends.

  Professor Bruce Jacobs (家博) is Director of the Centre of East Asian Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He is a special presidential election analyst for the Taipei Times.
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