by Ian Buruma
So there he was, with his sister, his brother-in-law, and a semiautomatic gun, waiting outside the door of the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, where Vice Premier Chiang Ching-kuo was speaking to a group of businessmen. The plan was to get close enough to shoot him in the stomach, for that way no one else would get hurt. It was, as it turned out, a flawed plan. Chiang emerged from the revolving door, and Huang lunged toward him with the gun, but before he was able to get sufficiently close, he was wrestled to the ground by two security guards. The gun went off, and the bullet lodged in a slab of marble above the entrance to the Plaza.
What followed was in a sense even more extraordinary than the deed itself. A collection among Taiwanese living in the U.S., mostly poor students, quickly produced the $190,000 required to get Huang out on bail, and he became a celebrated figure, lecturing on democracy at university campuses and organizing rallies for Taiwanese independence. But the idea of being jailed in America, which was bound to happen sooner or later, was “against [Huang’s] principles,” because the U.S. government was protecting the Chiang dynasty, so Huang used his contacts in the anti–Vietnam War movement and went into hiding.
The hardest thing about living away from one’s native country for so long is that it becomes a place of memory, an abstraction more than a living society. To stay in touch, Huang would occasionally emerge to join Taiwanese tour groups, posing as a tourist. But still, when he returned in 1996, Taiwan had become a strange place. He spent months just traveling up and down the island. Once, a friend took him up in a private plane, and Huang was shocked by the changes he saw. The countryside he had known as a young man had become industrial zones, and villages had grown into cities.
Huang’s brother-in-law had not been able to escape a jail sentence. After his arrest for assisting in the failed assassination, he fled to Sweden but was extradited to the United States, where he served his time in prison. Now he was back in Taiwan, too—legitimately, and running for the legislature as a DPP candidate. Huang was asked to support him. He smiled at the thought, a little wistfully, but also a little sardonically, in the manner of the young boy with an authority problem. Many people had asked him for his support, he said. “I guess, to many people I am what you might call a national hero. But I’ve deconstructed that. I don’t think heroes are very good for democracy.”
The 2-28 Incident could be spoken about in public only after martial law was lifted. It reached a kind of iconic status in 1989, when a Taiwanese movie entitled City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Hou Hsiao-hsien, the director, had started making serious movies in the Taiwanese language during the early 1980s, when the cultural and political climate began to loosen up. But 2-28 was still too delicate a topic to broach in those early days. Perhaps Hou’s film would not have been shown even in 1989 if it had not won a famous international prize. Banning it would have made the KMT government look worse.
Hou is too subtle an artist to divide his characters into heroes and villains. The violence of 2-28 and the “white terror” that followed, are observed through long lenses: figures being killed in a green, mountainous landscape. Shots are heard in the background, rattling in the night. Some Taiwanese, more ideologically driven than Hou, mistook subtlety for softness; they wanted anti-KMT propaganda. Hou’s film is much better than that. Shot in dark, muted colors, it reveals how a small-town Taiwanese family is torn apart by history—first by the war and then by its aftermath, including 2-28. The violence ebbs and flows, sometimes instigated by gangsters, sometimes by government troops; there is little difference. Two of the brothers have died by violence, one as a Japanese soldier during the war, another killed by mainland mobsters. A third brother goes mad after being tortured by the KMT as an alleged Japanese collaborator. The only survivor is a kindly deaf-mute, who runs a photographic studio. His best friend, Hinoe, takes to the hills as a revolutionary but is caught. The mute marries Hinoe’s sister, Hinomi—a Japanese name, like her brother’s. It is no coincidence, of course, that the main surviving witness of the calamities should be mute. Then, he too is taken away by the police.
City of Sadness was shot on location in Rui-fang, a small town on the east coast of Taiwan. After the success of the movie, Rui-fang became a popular destination for Taiwanese tourists, eager to soak up something of the almost vanished atmosphere of an older Taiwan, before the mainlanders came and before industrial transformations of the 1980s obliterated most historical traces on the island. I had seen the film and I had seen images in tourist folders of Rui-fang, with its old houses and narrow streets, descending like stone ladders toward the sea. Finally, in the spring of 1998, I saw the real thing.
I was actually on my way to a city named I-lan, where I wanted to visit a museum of the Taiwanese democracy movement. The fact that political events of the late 1970s and 1980s were already featured exhibits in a museum in 1998 showed how quickly things had changed. I was taken by two friends, a chatty Romanian stockbroker named Norman and his Taiwanese wife, Fu-mei, who worked as an editor for a soft-porn publication. Both in their twenties, they played loud CDs in their car as we wound our way through a landscape of dark-green pine trees, lush gorges, and mountain peaks knifing into the misty air.
As I had half expected, Rui-fang was a kind of open-air museum of the pre-KMT past, full of quaint tea shops, stores filled with overpriced, mediocre antiques, and dainty restaurants, all dolled up to look traditional. We pressed on to I-lan.
Inland from the coastal road, the country becomes glassy and flat: watery rice paddies with new, two-story farmhouses in their midst, like islands. There is something bleak and isolated about I-lan, hidden between mountains and sea; it was the kind of place, I was told, where people keep to themselves. Fu-mei told me that I-lan people are known for their independence. Even the Japanese had found it hard to control them.
The museum, which was in fact more like an archive, was in the center of town, on a dusty street, with some uninviting shops and the odd noodle restaurant. There were few people about. The museum looked barely finished. Inside was a strong smell of paint. We were greeted by a man in a red baseball cap, his face creased in a toothy grin. White tufts of hair protruded, like whiskers, from his nostrils. Could he have my visiting card? Since I assumed he was part of the museum staff, I shook his hand and handed him one.
Tapes of old political songs were playing in the basement, where a permanent exhibition of dissident journals and documents was stored. The songs sounded to me remarkably like the marching music favored by wartime Japanese and Communists on the Chinese mainland. We walked past the displays of photographs and papers, and I suddenly realized that when I had first visited Taiwan in the 1980s, most of the people in these pictures had still been in exile or jail. And many of the magazines and pamphlets, now neatly exhibited in glass cases, had still been forbidden materials, including a full set of issues of Formosa magazine, around which the opposition was formed in the late 1970s.
There was also a famous cartoon, drawn in 1968 by Bo Yang, of Popeye and his baby son trapped together on an island. Popeye says: “So you are the prince?” Baby son cries: “I want to be president!” To which Popeye replies: “You talk very big for such a small child.” For this innocuous little satire on the Generalissimo and his son, Bo was jailed for nine years. It could have been worse. His offense of “slandering the head of state” still carried the death penalty then.
As we were about to leave the premises, we were stopped by two women, who introduced themselves as members of the museum staff. They looked worried. Did we know the man in the red baseball cap? Was he a friend of ours? I said I thought he worked for the museum. Now they looked distinctly queasy. I should never have given him my card, they said. He might have been a government agent. This was two years after the first presidential elections in Chinese history. Taiwan was free. The dissidents in the photographs displayed in the museum were now running cities, and soon would perhaps run the country. But traces of the old paranoia remained.
On the way back to Taipei, Fu-mei played some more of her Taiwanese rock CDs. Taiwanese identity, she told me, 2-28, and all that bored young people now. “Identity” belonged to the 1980s. Today’s kids cared about more universal things: love, sex, et cetera. And yet . . . Fu-mei played me one CD by a local singer, wearing moody black clothes and dark glasses. It was an agonizing song about belonging to “the yellow race.” “My home is in Beijing,” he sang, sounding like a man in despair, “my home is in Hong Kong, my home is in Taipei, my home is in Lhasa. . . .” Another singer lamented “ancient China” and the sadness of “people who cannot go home.”
I felt there was a confusion here, which Fu-mei, dressed in black, like the rock singer, did little to clarify. She was a native Taiwanese, born in Taipei. The rock singer was a “mainlander,” also born in Taipei. I asked Fu-mei whether she ever listened to mainland Chinese rock music. “Never,” she said, with a hint of indignation. “Their culture is totally different. We have nothing in common with them.” Surely, I said, trying to press her on this matter, mainland Chinese culture was still closer to Taiwanese sensibilities than British or American culture. “No!” she said, very firmly. “It has nothing to do with us.”
Perhaps she was right. For in Taiwan, the narcissism of minor differences counts. Anglo-American pop culture is exciting, apparently universal, and unthreatening to the Taiwanese sense of themselves. Mainland China is a threat, because it is too close, too big, and too powerful. To maintain a sense of their uniqueness, Taiwanese have to reject the Chinese colossus, whereas mainland Chinese can enjoy and mimic Taiwanese or Hong Kong culture with no trouble at all. To them it is all part of the same cultural empire; and they are its center.
What goes for rock music and fashion goes for politics, too. Mainland Chinese dissidents speak enviously of the “Taiwanese model” of democracy and would like to adopt it themselves. But when the students defied their government in Tiananmen Square, few Taiwanese students came out to voice their support. Let the mainlanders take care of their own affairs, they seemed to say. For Taiwan could only be free in isolation—not from America or Japan, but from China. I thought of Kathy’s friend, who had said: “We can’t change them. So just don’t let them change us.”
There is nothing like the shared sense of victimhood to draw people together. And that is why, despite what my friends in the car had said, 2-28 will not go away, even now. I sometimes grew bored with the air of self-pity. It is, of course, easy for an outsider to be impatient when others wallow in collective misery. It is also easy for an outsider to grow tired of Taiwan’s willful provinciality, of the insistence of the Taiwanese that theirs is a small island, separate from the cultural motherland. In fact, you don’t have to be a foreigner to feel weary. Many children of mainlanders have left Taiwan for the United States—not just because they felt like strangers in a Taiwanese society, but because Taiwan felt like a backwater.
And yet I think the rejection of mainland China has been a vital element in Taiwan’s liberation. By looking away from China and the weight of its “ancient history,” Taiwanese are freed from the awful burden of having to carry its destiny. They don’t have to “save” China. Their indifference to “Chineseness,” even their active hostility to it, is parochial, but it also provides room for maneuver. Having chosen to remain firmly in the periphery, they don’t need to hold the center. And being excluded from government for so long, even as advisers, Taiwanese intellectuals were never tempted to become official scribes upholding an orthodoxy that was never theirs. No matter how much the KMT dogma, based on recovering the Chinese motherland, was drummed into them by political cadres, at schools, universities, or in the army, few of them would have felt “unpatriotic” by rejecting it.
Taiwanese nationalism, with all its resentments, had another important political effect. It forced the KMT, a Leninist party, much like the Chinese Communist Party, to make concessions. The mainlanders never made up more than 15 percent of a population of more than 20 million. To remain in power, the majority had to be appeased, first economically and later politically. Taiwanese farmers benefited from land reforms in the 1950s, but Taiwanese landowners were richly rewarded as well. And as a kind of compensation for accepting mainlander rule, Taiwanese businessmen were allowed to thrive and, indeed, dominate the economy. So while mainlanders for many years held power in the civil service, the legislature, and the armed forces, the Taiwanese had most of the wealth. But in the long run, acquiescence was not enough. More and more Taiwanese were brought into the KMT. Taiwanese candidates outside the KMT, known as the “outside party,” were allowed to run for office in cities and counties and, from the 1960s, to a very limited degree, in the central government as well.
The president responsible for lifting martial law, one year before his death, and finally allowing opposition parties to compete in elections, was Chiang Ching-kuo, the man who had narrowly escaped assassination. He was not a natural democrat. A remote and unprepossessing figure, with a notorious record as the former security chief, Chiang Ching-kuo nevertheless understood that Taiwan could be governed in the long run only with the consent of the Taiwanese. He also knew that recovery of the Chinese mainland was but a dream. It took a bit more than benevolence at the top, however, to test that consent in a truly open and democratic system.
The transition from dictatorship to democracy in Taiwan was captured most succinctly in an extraordinary black-and-white photograph. It was taken not at the time of the first free elections, which came sixteen years later. But it is an image of supreme defiance, and it showed everyone who saw it that the old regime was on the defensive. And almost everyone in Taiwan did see it. In a moment of censorial absentmindedness, the government allowed it to be published in all the newspapers. The picture is of the trial, in 1980, of the “Kaohsiung Eight,” the organizers of the rally for free speech and democracy in Kaohsiung on December 10, 1979.
The composition of the photograph is awkward, even naÏve, as though the photographer were not aware of the message it conveyed. Behind four of the eight defendants are four police officers—three men in white helmets and one young woman; their youth (as well as the period) is accentuated by the policewoman’s uniform, a miniskirt and black leather boots. Three of the defendants, casually dressed in jeans and open-necked shirts, look a bit apprehensive. But one, standing slightly behind the others, with his hands in his pockets, looks up with a broad smile on his handsome, mustachioed nightclub singer’s face. Since he, like the others, was being tried for a capital offense (sedition), the smile might strike one as a trifle unhinged. In fact, it is not. Neither is it exactly a smile of mockery, although it has a certain schoolboyish quality. It is rather the expression of a man who refuses to be intimidated, the kind of smile that enrages authorities, since it robs them of their most trusted tool, fear. And this was a man who had already spent fifteen years in prison. He knew what the authorities could do to him.
The smiler was Shih Ming-teh, the main organizer of the Kaohsiung Incident. The photograph still hangs in his office in Taipei, nicely framed, above a signed baseball, next to a plaque of the Rotary Club. Shih escaped the death penalty but was sentenced to life. Some of the time, he was in a tiny solitary cell; at other times, as a kind of cruel jest, he was locked up with a dangerous mental patient. Three times he went on hunger strike. And twice he refused to be pardoned, because that would have been an admission of guilt. In 1990, he was finally freed, by which time he weighed less than a hundred pounds.
When I first met him in 1998, Shih was a DPP senator. He rather enjoyed being called Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela. Indeed, he brought it up himself, with a roguish smile that was meant to convey a degree of charming self-mockery, which was not entirely convincing. Shih had the look of a nightclub entertainer: perfectly coiffed hair, expensive Italian ankle boots, a collarless white shirt, and a blue silk suit. His teeth looked unnaturally white, but then I remembered what had happened to his real teeth: smashed by the boot of an interrogator. Shih
may be vain, but he is also brave. Altogether he had spent twenty-five years, almost half his life, in jail.
I asked him about the picture. Shih laughed, caressed the sharp crease in his trouser leg, and began to speak softly in heavily accented Mandarin Chinese. The photo was taken during the first day of the trial, he said. He was aware that everyone in Taiwan would be watching it on the television news. He also expected he might die. So he decided to put on a show of dignity. Dictators, he said, “don’t want to create martyrs, so you must show your will. If you weaken, they will kill you.”
The photograph and the television images of Shih smiling in defiance had such a powerful effect in Taiwan, and created so much sympathy for the defendants, that broadcasts of the trial were immediately stopped. But Shih thinks the watershed for Taiwanese democracy had already been reached a month earlier, in Kaohsiung, where all the opposition leaders, “outside-party” moderates as well as more radical activists, had come together to demonstrate for political rights. Their arrests, and the trial of the Kaohsiung Eight, galvanized Taiwanese organizations abroad and stirred up public opinion at home. Before the trial, many people might still have believed the propaganda that opponents of the KMT were all “communist rebels.” But after they had heard the defendants talking reasonably in court about the need for free speech and general elections, few people believed the propaganda any longer. “After Kaohsiung,” said Shih, “people lost their fear. And the trial gave them a valuable lesson. It made them aware of their rights.”
It is easy to be charmed by “Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela.” Even his love of showmanship is endearing, if perhaps lacking in the gravitas many people expect from a professional politician. But then Shih, though a senator, is not really a professional politician. He is a romantic rebel whose heroics are no longer required in a democracy. When I talked to him, he seemed a bit bored by his present job. He said he was not really interested in campaigning. It was too tiring. He had resigned his position as chairman of the DPP two years before. Mere ambition, after all, is not fit for heroes.