Newly declassified documents tie former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) to the political persecution of members of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Philosophy in the 1970s, the Transitional Justice Commission said.
Chiang, who was premier at the time, should ultimately be considered responsible for the persecution, the commission said.
The commission made the remarks after the National Security Bureau and the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau declassified intelligence files related to what is known as the NTU Department of Philosophy Incident.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
The documents shed new light on the matter, which has several unresolved mysteries, and would help with investigations, the commission said in a statement.
The incident refers to a series of dismissals of liberal-leaning professors at the department from 1972 to 1975, during the Martial Law era.
Twelve faculty members were fired, mostly by then-department director Sun Chih-shen (孫智燊), who was conducting a political purge to remove members who were deemed pro-Communist by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
Following the purge, the government forced NTU to close the entire department for a year.
As the files give insight into the bureaus’ attitudes toward Sun, they help with investigations about how government officials interacted with the department, the commission said.
The documents show that shortly after Sun took over as department head, he reported to the Investigation Bureau that the department was a foothold for the Chinese Communist Party to prepare for Taiwan’s unification with China.
The bureau did not entirely take Sun’s accusation seriously, and in addition to having officials monitor the department, it assigned a student to spy on Sun, the documents show.
However, the National Security Bureau appeared to be more inclined to support Sun in his purge, the files show.
Given the new information in the files, the incident should not be viewed as a single political event, but one of several related episodes, all of which involved Chiang, who was the top decisionmaker at the time, the commission said.
The NTU Department of Philosophy Incident happened because Chiang could not make his judgements based on facts, it added.
Last year at a forum held by NTU’s Department of History, Lee Jih-chang (李日章), one of the fired professors, said that prior to the purge, Chiang had long been eyeing the department to “rectify” it.
Online platform Watchout quoted Lee as saying that Chiang once told a military officer who was about to be stationed at the university: “I can control all the universities in Taiwan but NTU, because it is too liberal and soldiers have a low status there, so I hope you can help me break some fresh ground.”
Lee said that former Political Warfare Bureau director-general Wang Sheng (王昇) — one of the main orchestrators of the purge — also told the military officer that “ideologies adopted by thinkers in Taiwan are a mess now, with the NTU philosophy department at the root of the mess, so you are going there to recover lost land on behalf of Chiang.”
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