The Council of Grand Justices’ Constitutional Interpretation No. 644 has struck down Article 2 of the Civil Organizations Act (人民團體法), which prohibited civil groups from advocating communism or secession, because it violated the constitutional protection of freedom of speech and association.
Why did the promotion of communism and Taiwanese independence become taboos in the Martial Law era? Against the backdrop of the Temporary Provisions Effective during the Period of National Mobilization for the Suppression of the Communist Rebellion (動員勘亂時期臨時條款), the Chinese Civil War and the Cold War, it is easier to understand why victims of the White Terror in the 1950s included those suspected of having communist connections. Indeed, thousands of political prisoners held on Green Island, Taitung County, in the 1950s came from this group.
At that time, the call for Taiwanese independence could only be circulated among a small number of Taiwanese intellectuals in Japan and the US. In September 1961 the Taiwan Garrison Command released a report on a so-called “pro-independence conspiracy” and brought trumped-up charges against Kao Yu-shu (高玉樹), Kuo Yu-hsin (郭雨新) and other prominent figures.
Political cases did not have to be based on evidence, and the importance given to a case and punishments were based on political motives. But in the end, only Yunlin County councilor Su Tung-chi (蘇東啟) and a few other less prominent defendants were found guilty of subversion.
Defendants in other cases relating to independence in the 1960s included Shih Ming-teh (施明德), Chen San-hsing (陳三興), Tsai Tsai-yuan (蔡財源) and some military students, Peng Ming-min (彭明敏) — the co-author of the Declaration of Taiwan Self-Salvation — and Lin Shui-chuan (林水泉) and Huang Hua (黃華), who belonged to a pro-independence national youth association.
Gradually, the number of pro-independence political prisoners at the Taiyuan (泰源) rehabilitation camp, also in Taitung County, caught up with the number of communist prisoners. This showed that the threat to the legality and legitimacy of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime came not only from communists but also Taiwanese who wanted to be their own masters.
Today, communism and Taiwanese independence are as incompatible as fire and water. But during the Martial Law era, the KMT portrayed dangwai (outside the KMT, 黨外) activists, overseas pro-independence activists and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the “three-in-one enemy” of the state.
This can be observed in the interrogation of prisoners caught up in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979. Some were charged with communist espionage, and others with fomenting independence.
Based on my observations, the causes of Taiwanese independence, democracy and freedom were using each other. This was the factor that forced the KMT to lift martial law and the ban on political parties in the 1980s, a result that could not have been achieved by any one cause alone.
As for communism, the CCP abandoned its ideological framework in the 1990s, making it pointless to replace martial law with the National Security Act (國家安全法) to ban communism and Taiwanese independence.
Constitutional Interpretation No. 644 thus accords with reality. Communism is already passe.
But what about Taiwanese independence? It is no longer a tool to fight oppression, but rather an unaccomplished goal in the Taiwanese people’s pursuit of identity. Our challenge now is to enrich the discourse in a responsible manner and turn it into a universal pursuit.
Chen Yi-shen is an associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
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