The White Terror era has not been put to rest because the public still doesn’t know exactly what happened during the period and its impact can still be felt today, speakers said yesterday at a conference in Taipei on the White Terror era.
“I remember that I used to play with a group of neighbors’ kids when I was little, and one day, two brothers who always played with us just disappeared,” former Presidential Office secretary-general Chen Shih-meng (陳師孟) told the forum. “We only learned vaguely from adults that the two brothers’ father was taken away by the military police and never came home, and their mother moved away with the two kids.”
“I think many people of my age have similar memories of the White Terror [era], but we never knew how the government operated [during the period] or had an in-depth understanding of it,” he said, adding that first-hand experiences or stories like his had cast a shadow over many Taiwanese, especially when it comes to expressing political ideas.
IRON HAND
The White Terror era in Taiwan refers to a period of time when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime — mostly under the leadership of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), ruled Taiwan with an iron hand and killed or jailed thousands of political dissidents. To help the audience yesterday better understand how tightly the authoritarian regime of former dictators Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) watched over the people, Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮), a professor at National Chengchi University’s (NCCU) Graduate Institute of Taiwanese History, gave some facts from her research.
“There were secret service agencies created by the government, the military and the KMT to keep an eye on people both inside and outside their respective organizations — there was even a special overseas commission within the KMT and overseas intelligence units within Taiwan’s embassies to monitor Taiwanese activities abroad,” she said.
She said that under the Investigation Bureau alone there were more than 30,000 uniformed or underground agents spying on Taiwanese in the 1970s.
WOUNDS
“The wounds of the White Terror [era] have never fully healed — the government never conducted a thorough investigation into it, never prosecuted anyone responsible for political repression and never fully compensated the victims,” said Wellington Koo (顧立雄), a member of the Lei Chen Foundation for Democracy and Human Rights. “That’s why it [the White Terror] still has an influence on Taiwanese society and often blocks social progress even today.”
“The twisted legal system that we have today is a relic from the authoritarian period,” said NCCU Taiwanese history professor Hsueh Hua-yuan (薛化元), another panelist at the forum.
“Whether you like it or not, the Constitution of the Republic of China says that the judiciary, the executive and the legislative branches of the government have to be independent of each other,” he said. “But our courts and prosecutors — except the Supreme Court — are all under the Ministry of Justice, which is part of the executive branch.”
Hsueh said the late dictators designed the government in this way so that the executive branch could control the legal system, “and political intervention in the judiciary is still there from time to time today.”
As Taiwanese society has yet to fully recover from the wounds of the White Terror era and clean up its fallout, speakers at the conference expressed concern that the authoritarian system could make an easy comeback.
Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said in her speech at the forum that the government has taken many measures that violate human rights or remind people of the authoritarian past since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took office.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS