Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) is expected to attend an event to honor people killed during the White Terror era, including a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spy uncovered within the KMT government in 1950, event organizers said yesterday.
The event is to honor Wu Shi (吳石), a lieutenant general who was the Ministry of National Defense’s deputy chief of the general staff. Wu was executed after being convicted as spying for the CCP during the White Terror era.
Wu was accused of providing the CCP with critical intelligence on KMT troop deployments in southeast China, southern China and Taiwan when the KMT government was based in Nanjing, China, Taiwan Human Rights Memory Bank documents showed.
Photo: CNA
He continued working for the CCP after arriving in Taiwan, leading to his arrest and execution, the documents showed.
The CCP calls Wu a “martyr” and has promoted his story through a television show titled Silent Honor (沉默的榮耀).
The annual memorial service, organized by the Taiwan Area Political Victims’ Mutual Help Association, is to be held at Machangding Memorial Park (馬場町紀念公園) in Taipei’s Wanhua District (萬華), where Wu was executed.
The association, which advocates unification with China, called the park a “historic site where Wu and other martyrs sacrificed their lives,” expressing hope that “silent glory would no longer be silent.”
Cheng is expected to speak at the event.
The event’s theme this year is “Remembering history, cherishing the memory of martyrs, cross-strait solidarity, revitalizing the Chinese nation,” the association said in a statement.
The event would also include a tribute from the Beijing-based Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League.
During the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War, many people sacrificed their youth or their lives, Cheng told reporters yesterday.
In Taiwan, many communist spies faced trial, while in China, many KMT members and political workers were arrested, imprisoned or killed, she said.
Hopefully such tragedies will never happen again, she added.
Taiwan has undergone decades of democratic transformation and is now a place that fully respects freedom of speech and individual thought, Cheng said.
Her attendance at the event would “hopefully advance cross-strait reconciliation and peace, and a society in which no one needs to pay the price for their personal political beliefs,” she said
Democratic Progressive Party spokeswoman Tai Wei-shan (戴瑋姍) said that although the memorial is framed as a “commemoration of the White Terror,” its actual focus is on intelligence agents of the CCP.
The organizers even promote the spirit of communist spies by hailing Silent Honor, which has a strong “united front” message, Tai said.
Cheng’s attendance would be equivalent to accepting the CCP’s historical narrative and cooperating with its “united front” tactics, she said, adding: “This raises the question: Is Cheng the chairwoman of Taiwan’s KMT or China’s KMT?”
Additional reporting by Chen Cheng-yu and CNA
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