Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) did irreparable damage to Taiwan by enacting martial law to impose autocratic rule and military control during the post-war era, as well as by leaving the UN, which severed Taiwan’s ties to the rest of the world, historians and human rights advocates said at an academic conference in Taipei yesterday.
It has been 50 years since Chiang of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) died in 1975, Koo Kwang-ming Foundation executive director Michelle Wang (王美琇) said, adding: “Now we must examine and take account of his authoritarian rule, that many democracy activists and dissidents lost their lives during Chiang’s bloody White Terror regime.”
“We did not properly deal with our history or pass down memories of the White Terror to the younger generations,” she said. “It has led to the current political turmoil in the legislature, with the KMT legislative members — the inheritors and followers of Chiang — being so brazen as to use democratic means to trample and dismantle democracy.”
Photo: Tien Yu-hua, Taipei Times
Fu Jen Catholic University law professor Lin Cheng-yu (林政佑) said that the KMT with Chiang at the helm placed the Republic of China under military control for many decades until the lifting of martial law in 1987, adding that Chiang used the military apparatus, state security forces and intelligence agencies to impose pervasive surveillance over the whole of society.
“Chiang must be held accountable for such abuses, and the people should demand justice for his flouting of the regular justice system, trying activists and dissidents in the military courts,” he said.
Other historians said that cases in the military courts usually proceeded swiftly and lacked time for thorough investigation, leading to convictions based on insufficient grounds and circumstantial evidence.
Some defendants were tortured into giving a confession, while Chiang himself interfered in the process, turning imprisonment into death sentences in many cases.
Law professor Wu Hao-jen (吳豪人) said that Chiang did huge damage by cutting Taiwan’s links to the world when he left the UN following the admission of the People’s Republic of China, as several key nations advised him to remain as a representative of Taiwan instead.
“It is only much, much later on, after Taiwan’s democratization, that we could link up again with international agreements on human rights and freedom,” Wu said.
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