by Ian Buruma
Shih was born in Kaohsiung in 1941. Close friends and relatives still use his Japanese nickname, Nori. He says he can remember the city being hit by American bombers at the end of the war. But his first vivid memory of violence was an execution he witnessed during the white terror, following 2-28. A man was made to kneel in the street near Shih’s house, opposite the main railway station, and executed by a shot in the neck. One eyeball lodged, like a shiny marble, on the branch of a tree close to where Shih was standing.
It was at this time that Shih’s father, a Roman Catholic and a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine, was arrested. After two months of interrogation, he came home a broken man. He said the Taiwanese would never be free to control their own destiny. Shih read books about great military heroes—Napoleon, Hannibal, and Alexander the Great—and dreamed of dying for his country.
It was unusual for a native Taiwanese, and a rather bookish one at that, to choose a career in the army, though Shih’s worship of military heroes may have had something to do with it. After graduating from the military academy, he was sent to serve on a small island near the Chinese mainland. Life on such island bases was tedious and the soldiers spent much of their time raising pigs. It was there, in 1962, that Shih’s troubles began, when he was arrested and accused of plotting sedition. The interrogators cited conversations going back to his high school days. Every indiscreet remark had been reported; every bit of youthful bravado was on record. He was told to confess to being a member of a revolutionary group called the Taiwan Independence League. Shih admitted he had had conversations with friends about independence, among other things, but denied ever having been engaged in a plot to overthrow the KMT government.
The most notorious place of detention for political prisoners was the Garrison Command Security Center in Taipei, where such well-known techniques as the “toothbrush torture” and the “airplane torture” were employed to extract confessions. The first involved scraping female genitals with a hard brush. In the airplane treatment, a prisoner was hog-tied and suspended in mid-air from a pole. Shih was beaten so badly that his spine was damaged and he lost all his teeth. He received a life sentence, his first.
But the lowest point of his incarceration between 1962 and 1977 came after a failed escape attempt by several prisoners. Shih took no part in what he regarded as a hopeless venture, but he knew who the organizers were. He refused to give up their names, however, even when he was forced to live in a solitary cell that was too small for him to stand up or lie down in at full length. Shih’s mother died while he was inside, and his wife left him for another man.
When Shih received amnesty in 1977, under pressure from President Carter’s human-rights policies, Taiwan was a different place from the country it had been at the time of his arrest. It was much richer, of course, but the political climate had begun to change as well. Local elections for city and county magistrates had been held since the 1950s. And there had also been elections for the provincial government of Taiwan and a few outlying islands. The national government, however, whose legislature was still filled with old men who had received their mandates in China before 1949, was the exclusive domain of the KMT. But in 1969, the first “outside-party” member, Huang Hsin-chieh, was voted into the national legislature. He was joined in 1973 by another outside-party legislator, Kang Ning-hsiang. And in 1977 the outside-party candidates in local and provincial elections won 38 percent of the votes.
It looked as though Taiwan might be evolving slowly into a democracy, even though political parties, apart from the KMT, were still banned, martial law was still enforced and political gatherings were forbidden. But as memories of 2-28 lost their fearful edge, Taiwanese intellectuals were becoming more politically active. Opposition journals began to appear. The number of seats up for election in the national government was limited. Opposition publications were usually swiftly banned. And it was almost impossible for outside-party politicians to beat KMT candidates who had the money, the connections, and the party machine to back them. But it was a beginning.
Things began to look even better when President Chiang Ching-kuo allowed supplementary elections in 1978 for the national legislature—again, after pressure from the Carter administration. Opposition leaders used informal occasions—weddings, funerals, graduation ceremonies—to meet and organize across the nation. A non-KMT Kaohsiung County magistrate, Yu Teng-fa, the man who later died under peculiar circumstances in his bathroom, put up money for a group to help opposition candidates. Yu was the chief of a political clan that had provided local bosses since the Japanese days, and perhaps even before. Such chiefs acted rather like old-fashioned mafia dons; regardless of who happened to be in power, they cut the deals and took care of their people. Yu was very much in that mold, a square-faced gambling man who wore loud suits and refused to take orders from anyone.
And then things suddenly came to a halt. Without a warning to the Republic of China on Taiwan, U.S. relations with Beijing were normalized in 1979 and official relations with the ROC were terminated. Days before polling day, the KMT government decided to abort the national elections. Yu Teng-fa announced that he would attend a rally in Kaohsiung to protest this decision. This led to the old man’s arrest. Dissidents from all over Taiwan, including some elected officials, gathered for a public demonstration. More arrests were made. The scene was set for a serious confrontation.
The rallying point for all dissidents on Taiwan was the journal Formosa, founded in August 1979. By December it had reached a circulation of more than 100,000. The general manager was Shih Ming-teh. Every major city in Taiwan had a Formosa office. Known as “service stations,” they were actually offices of a nameless, unofficial political party. Demonstrations became more frequent, often accompanied by violence—provoked, perhaps, by turned ex-Communists, who were used by the government as goons. Shih Ming-teh decided that December 10, universal Human Rights Day, would be a good occasion for a large rally in Kaohsiung.
Exactly what happened that night is still a matter of debate. No one disputes that two men, connected to Formosa, were arrested on December 9 as they drove a sound truck through Kaohsiung to announce the time and place of the rally. They were picked up at the police station the following day, and rushed to the hospital. Torture, said the Formosa people; resisting arrest, said the police. Shih had ordered the purchase of 130 wooden stakes—for “self-defense,” he said. The government spoke of an armed rebellion. Permission for a rally was first denied and then granted, but not at the place where the organizers had planned it. So the crowd built up in front of the Formosa office and in a nearby park. The police got jumpy. Torches lit up the evening sky. The crowd sang Taiwanese songs and “We Shall Overcome.” The police tried to block the people in the park from joining the others. Scuffles broke out, and policemen were attacked—by agents provocateurs, said the organizers; by rebels, said the police.
Stirring words came through the megaphones that had not been heard in public before: “Oppose one-party dictatorship! Long live the people of Taiwan! Long live democracy!” For twenty minutes, a well-known feminist, “Annette” Lu Hsiu-lien, made an emotional speech: “My dear fellow Taiwanese,” she cried. “If you are Taiwanese and you are not with us here today, you will not have a clear conscience later. . . . Have we ever had a time when we ourselves were masters in our own house? Isn’t it true that we have always been slaves, subject to the whims of others? We have never overcome.” Annette Lu was one of the Kaohsiung Eight and received a twelve-year jail sentence.
During her speech, riot squads began to menace the crowd. Shih Ming-teh desperately tried to keep things under control and begged the police to back off: “This office of Formosa magazine,” he cried, his voice breaking, “is the sacred ground of the Taiwanese people. Please stop here. Taiwanese soldiers, lay down your arms! You Taiwanese soldiers are all our brothers and sisters.”
Similar words were spoken at Tiananmen ten years later, when students and citizens of Beijing appealed to the pa
triotism of the People’s Liberation Army soldiers. But the police in Kaohsiung moved in with tear gas and batons, not tanks. The crowd fought back with fists and sticks. How many policemen got hurt—many, said the police; not so many, said the organizers—and how many demonstrators—none, said the police; many, said the organizers—is still unclear.
All the main organizers, Formosa editors, and other dissidents were immediately arrested. Shih Ming-teh did the traditional Taiwanese thing and sought refuge in a Presbyterian church, where he was hidden by a minister. A dental surgeon and Formosa colleague tried to disguise his features by performing crude plastic surgery on his jaw. It was not a success. Shih was soon betrayed to the police by two men who had been in prison with him. They disappeared and were never heard from again. The amateur surgeon later became the mayor of Taichung, the third largest city in Taiwan.
The arguments about what precisely happened on December 10, 1979, are entangled with a debate about the effect of the events. Shih and other witnesses were caught up in the same embittered arguments I had heard about Tiananmen: journalist Dai Qing’s criticism of the “radicals” who had recklessly provoked the Communist autocrats, and student leader Li Lu’s defense that the Chinese people after Tiananmen were no longer slaves. Dai Qing is still convinced that Tiananmen set back the cause of “liberalism.” Li Lu thinks it exposed the government’s moral and political bankruptcy. “Reformist” intellectuals say direct confrontation was naÏve, and irresponsible. Chai Ling, Li Lu, Wu’er Kaixi, Wang Dan, and other former student leaders say they may have been young and naÏve, but they wonder where their elders were when it was time to stand up and be counted.
Kaohsiung was of course not Tiananmen, and the KMT in 1979 was not like the Chinese Communist Party in 1989. But the arguments are strikingly similar. Shih says: “Sure, we lacked experience, but who dares to say they had more? And where were those who thought they had more experience anyway? Of course we could have done better. But why did those who think they could have done better not join us and lead us?” The “reformists,” on the other hand, think Kaohsiung was a serious setback. After all, they say, Taiwan had been slowly evolving toward a democratic system. The editor of Formosa, Chang Chun-hung, said: “I never wanted to go to prison. It was Shih Ming-teh who got me into trouble.”
Annette Lu was going to run for the legislature, and she likes to say that she would have won if only she hadn’t been arrested. But she can hardly blame Shih for her disappointment, for the elections were suspended months before the rally in Kaohsiung even took place.
I had heard a great deal about Annette Lu while traveling in Taiwan. I had heard how she had started a feminist movement in the 1970s. And people spoke in awe of her Harvard law degree. In 1992 she was at last elected to the legislature. When I visited Taiwan six years later, she was mayor of Taoyuan County. I made an appointment to see her at her county seat, about a hour’s drive from Taipei. I wanted to ask her what had happened all those years ago in Kaohsiung and what she thought about it now.
Taoyuan has a reputation for racketeering and violent crime. A crime syndicate, protected by local KMT bosses, monopolized garbage collection and transportation, and when there were challengers to this arrangement, the mob made sure that garbage piled up for two months. Annette Lu was elected as county chief after her predecessor was murdered, along with seven other people. The case was never solved.
Taoyuan, like so many Taiwanese towns, is a jumbled place, with messy streets and market stalls selling phony French handbags, betel nuts, electronics, and sexy lingerie. Narrow lanes are lined with massage parlors, with blinking fairy-lights and barbershops and karaoke bars, thrown together in cheap materials of pink and baby blue. Girls totter about in high-heeled shoes, and young men in white suits chatter on their cell phones.
The cleanest, most impressive—indeed, monumental—building is the new county hall. I had noticed this elsewhere in Taiwan. The new democracy—or perhaps it was just a sign of new Taiwanese wealth—was heralded by gigantic government buildings, many of them done up in a neoclassical, quasi-Mussolinian style: too many Greek columns, great domes, and vast roofs.
Annette Lu’s office was of gigantic proportions, with an enormous desk at one end. On the wall, above the usual knickknacks of high office, including a large gold clock of truly extraordinary ugliness, hung a huge photograph of the beaming mayor herself, framed in elaborately worked gold. Like many middle-aged ladies in Taiwan, she wore a great deal of makeup and jewelry. I hoped to break the ice by remarking on the size of the new government buildings. This was met with a look of undisguised disapproval. She tugged, a little impatiently, at the sleeves of her cream-colored jacket and looked at me severely through a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, waiting for me to begin.
I asked about her childhood. She was born in Taoyuan, the daughter of a self-educated businessman, and she grew up idolizing both her father and her elder brother. Her father made it clear he wished she were a boy, and she tried her best to be like her brother. They encouraged her to read the newspapers and practice her skills as a speaker. She was told stories about great historical figures, all men. Whatever her brother did, she would do as well, indeed better. So when he studied law, she did the same, and graduated at the top of her class. In the early 1970s, she went to the United States for further studies and became a feminist. The problem with Taiwan, she concluded, was the patriarchal Chinese society. She returned to Taiwan in 1978 to join the opposition.
She had told the same story often. I had read it before in newspaper clippings, a standard tale of political awakening. There was no tentativeness in her manner of speaking, no moment of doubt or reflection; there was not enough time for that. She seemed irritated when I asked her about Kaohsiung. “I delivered the most important speech that night,” she said, and reached for a book on the shelf behind her desk. It was her biography. “You can read it all in here.”7
I asked her whether the demonstration had promoted or retarded democracy. She said she “would have been able to do more for Taiwan” if she had not been involved in the Kaohsiung Incident. She said that if “people like Shih Ming-teh” had not been in charge, “things would have been different. He had no idea what he was getting into. It was a trap set up by the KMT to crack down on the opposition. Unfortunately, he had not been aware of that.”
Then, suddenly she drew herself up and said: “Look, I’m a very busy woman, and I have no time for trivia. What is it you want to know?”
My mouth went dry. I realized I had badly misjudged the occasion. The interview had turned into an embarrassment. I had no idea what else to ask her. She was a professional dealing with the complicated daily affairs of a difficult region. Kaohsiung was history. A romantic, like Shih Ming-teh, might bask in past heroism and reflect on its meanings, but Annette Lu had no time for such things. After one or two more perfunctory questions, I decided I had better leave, whereupon her face lit up in the radiant smile of her official portrait. She asked me to repeat my name, took up a gold pen, and signed her book for me.
On my way back to Taipei, I thought about the difference between Shih and Lu—the romantic rebel hero and the ambitious politician; the “radical” who dreams of dying for his people and the feminist who wants to succeed in a world dominated by men. It is in the nature of any dictatorship to want to divide its opponents. And the natural gulf between reformists, who try to work inside the system, and the rebels, who feel more at home in the streets, is the easiest thing to exploit. It was easier to like Shih Ming-teh than Annette Lu. Rebels usually have more charm. But the importance of Kaohsiung was that for a moment these divisions were forgotten: radicals, reformists, sympathizers, fellow travelers, inside and outside the system, all came together in a gesture of defiance. This, as much as slow negotiation, is a necessary condition for change. Without it, a dictatorship, or a one-party state, will try to drag its feet forever while the reformists blame the radicals for their frustrations.
And in fact change did com
e to Taiwan. The elections for seats in the national government took place in 1980. The Kaohsiung Eight could not run for office, but their wives and lawyers did. One of these lawyers, Frank Hsie, eventually became the DPP mayor of Kaohsiung in 1999. Another, Chen Shui-bian, later became mayor of Taipei, and later still, in 2000, the first president of Taiwan. His vice president was Annette Lu.
There was something reassuring about the sheer wackiness of the election campaigns in 1999. The euphoria of 1996 had faded. The mayoral contests for Kaohsiung, Taipei, and the legislative elections throughout Taiwan were almost politics as usual—that is to say, marked by the nonsense, calumnies, and froth that go with campaigns in most democracies. In front of the same DPP headquarters in Kaohsiung where three years ago I had heard harsh stories of punishment and sacrifice, I stood in the afternoon sun looking at a bizarre float called the “King-tanic.” It was a contraption on wheels made up to resemble a cruise ship. (The movie Titanic had been a big hit in Taiwan as well as in mainland China.) On board the “King-tanic” stood various candidates in fancy dress, some of them well-known ex-dissidents, who had spent many years abroad or in prison. There was Hsu Hsin-liang, a veteran activist, dressed in a white admiral’s costume and mugging like a nightclub entertainer. Another DPP candidate, made up to look like Popeye, was sucking on his pipe, flexing his arm, and rolling his eyes. And while the candidates made faces at the cameras, a group of male dancers in sailor suits and dyed-blond hair gyrated to a song by Madonna. Taiwan, I thought, has finally joined the free world.