Yen Shih-hung (顏世鴻), a renowned physician, author and victim during the White Terror era, has died at the age of 96.
The news of Yen’s death was confirmed yesterday by his niece, known by the penname Mi Kuo (米果), who said her uncle passed away peacefully on Friday.
The White Terror era refers to a period of political repression by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) from 1949 to 1987.
Photo: screen grab from National Human Rights Museum’s Web site
Yen was born in October 1927 in Kaohsiung and at the age of three, his family moved to Fujian Province in China.
They returned to Taiwan after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937.
After the end of World War II, Yen studied at National Taiwan University’s (NTU) College of Medicine and in 1950, at the introduction of schoolmate Yeh Sheng-chi (葉盛吉), he joined the Communist Party in Taiwan, which at the time was governed by the KMT under Martial Law.
Due to this and another related case, Yen was sentenced to 12 years in prison and in May 1951, began serving his sentence on Green Island where he remained until 1962.
Yen in 2012 published an autobiography titled No. 3, Qingdao East Road: My Hundred-Year Memories and Taiwan’s Outrageous Era (青島東路三號:我的百年之憶 及台灣的荒謬年代).
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