Taiwan Kuomintang: Revisiting the White Terror years

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-35723603

By Cindy SuiBBC News, Taipei13 March 2016

Huang Wen-kung (centre and right) was one of many dissidents killed during the White Terror

The night before Huang Wen-kung was executed, he wrote five letters to his family, including his five-month-old daughter whom he had never seen.

It was the first and last time he had communicated with her.

"My most beloved Chun-lan, I was arrested when you were still in your mother's womb," said the 1953 letter.

"Father and child cannot meet. Alas, there's nothing more tragic than this in the world."

His daughter only got the letter 56 years later.

"As soon as I read the first sentence, I cried," Huang Chun-lan said. "I finally had a connection with my father. I realised not only do I have a father, but this father loved me very much."

Ms Huang only received her father's letter 56 years after he wrote it

The letters were among some 300 papers handed to Ms Huang's daughter when she applied for documents about her grandfather from government archives in 2008.

That led to archive workers finding personal writings, mostly letters to families, that another 179 political prisoners had written before they were executed during Taiwan's "White Terror" period of suppression.

Tens of thousands of people suspected of being anti-government were arrested, and at least 1,200 executed, between 1949 and 1992.

The Huangs lost their father in 1953

The letters, and the recent election of opposition leader Tsai Ing-wen as president, have renewed calls for a thorough look at this dark period and its precursor, the 228 Incident.

This was a 1947 crackdown on protesters who voiced discontent over the then Kuomintang party's rule over Taiwan as it faced defeat by the communists in mainland China.

The estimate of the number of civilians killed in the crackdown ranges from 2,000 to more than 25,000 civilians.

Experts say a lot remains unknown about both periods, due to a lack of transparency.

The government never issued a death toll. It is barely mentioned in history textbooks, researchers say.

Historians also say papers may have been destroyed. It was not until 2002 that Taiwan's Archives Act prohibited important documents from being destroyed.

Taiwan's president-elect clearly believes that how the country deals with its past will affect its future social and political cohesion.

She indicated recently it still had not properly dealt with this period despite the designation of 28 February as a public holiday to commemorate victims of the 228 Incident, and memorials, compensation payments and presidential apologies.

"Only with truth will there be reconciliation," she said in a recent speech. "Only with reconciliation will there be unity. Only then can Taiwan move forward."

She has pledged to seek truth and justice.

Seeking closure

For victims' families, learning about the fate of their loved ones, while knowing nobody was punished, is difficult to swallow.

The many memorials to Taiwan's then President, Chiang Kai-shek, who they see as the biggest culprit, deepen the pain.

Lan Yun-jo, whose father was executed in 1951 for writing articles critical of the government in an underground newspaper, learned only through a researcher that his life might have been spared had it not been for Chiang.

Her father went into hiding and was not arrested despite a big cash reward offered for his whereabouts. He surrendered after the authorities jailed Ms Lan's mother and Lan, who was a baby then and needed to be breastfed. Within six months, he was executed.

"Under his hands, many jail sentences were converted to death sentences," said Ms Lan.

Chiang Kai-shek has a mixed legacy in Taiwan

While victims' families label Chiang "the murderer", others, especially those whose families fled with him from communist China, credit him with liberating Taiwan from Japanese colonial rule.

They argue he had to consolidate control over the island and keep it from descending into chaos and falling under communist rule.

But most agree his methods were excessive.

Some of those arrested did support communism but only because they were repulsed by Chiang's harsh suppression of dissent.

Others were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and many were intellectuals who just wanted a more democratic society.

The letters expressing love, sadness and regret provide a window into their hearts.

Despite facing death, some stood by their beliefs.

In one letter, a prisoner wrote to his mother: "There is nothing more that can be said about what has happened to me. I only ask that you not be sad, that you live happily, and that you be proud of your child, who is sacrificing for this era."

Archive workers in recent years have uncovered letters which 179 political prisoners wrote before they were executed

For many families, the letters came too late.

In Ms Huang's father's letter to her mother, he deeply apologised for making her a widow at a young age and asked her to remarry.

"When we received these letters, my mother was already suffering from dementia, so she couldn't understand what we were reading to her," said Ms Huang, who wants more documents to be declassified.

"This is something we really regret. The truth about history should be revealed."

Daughter reads letter from White Terror victim

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-35800204

14 March 2016 Last updated at 00:37 GMT

Huang Chun-lan was just five months old when her father was executed by the Taiwanese government in 1953 and a few years ago she discovered a letter her father had written to her before he died.

During the White Terror, tens of thousands of people suspected of being critical of the government were jailed, and at least 1,200 of them were executed.

Ms Huang shared her story with the BBC.

Music Credit: Thinking of You by Evan Yiche Lee

Taiwan Families Receive Goodbye Letters Decades After Executions

Taiwan Families Receive Goodbye Letters Decades After Executions

By PAUL MOZUR February 4, 2016

http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160204/c04taiwan/en-us/

Guo Su-jen, whose father was executed during political repression in Taiwan in 1952, tending her garden in Taipei.  Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The month before he was executed, in April 1952, Guo Ching wrote letters to his mother, wife and children to say goodbye.

The letters had only 140 miles to travel, but they would take 60 years to be delivered.

When his daughter finally received her father’s farewell after a protracted negotiation with Taiwan’s government, she was in her 60s, twice his age when he died.

A photo album handmade in prison during the White Terror by Liu Yao-ting, a victim of it. The album is held at the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation in Taipei, Taiwan.
 Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

“I kept crying, because I could now read what my father had written,” said the daughter, Guo Su-jen. “If I’d never seen his writing, I would have no sense of him as a living person. His writing makes him alive again. Without it, he would live only in my imagination, how I picture him.”

The letters were among 177 uncovered in the past decade that were written by victims of the political repression known as the White Terror. From 1947 to 1987, tens of thousands of Taiwanese were imprisoned and at least 1,000 were executed, most in the early 1950s, after being accused of spying for Communist China.

The lost missives, which have been given to family members in recent years, are painful souvenirs from decades of authoritarian rule in Taiwan, a small part of the history buried in poorly cataloged government archives. But the landslide victory for President-elect Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party in January may soon bring much more of that history to light: In her campaign, Ms. Tsai vowed to do more to chronicle and right the injustices of Taiwan’s authoritarian past.

Guo Ching, right, wrote letters to his mother, wife and children to say goodbye, though they were not delivered for 60 years. Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

The letters are not just documentary evidence, though; they are also last expressions of love from beyond the grave. They offer words of comfort to children who grew up not knowing their parents and final apologies to spouses who would raise children alone.

They were uncovered only by chance in 2008, when a young woman requested information about her grandfather from Taiwan’s main archive.

Two weeks after applying for the records, the woman, Chang Yi-Lung, was given a stack of more than 300 pages of photocopied documents, mostly court records and rulings. Within those pages, she discovered letters her grandfather had written to her aunt and uncle and to her mother, who had not yet been born when he was killed.

To her mother he wrote: “Before long I will leave this earth. I am trying to stay calm, to talk with you for the first and last time on this paper. I fear you can’t imagine what it’s like, alas. To face this moment and be unable to see you once, to hug you once, to kiss you once … I am heartbroken. My regret is unending.”

Ms. Chang said her mother’s response to the letter has not changed since the first time she read it.

“Every time she reads it, it’s the same,” Ms. Chang said. “From the first word she starts crying. She had never seen her father, so it was like he didn’t exist, but when she saw the letter she knew she had a father, and that he loved her.”

While Taiwan’s government has reckoned with some of the traumas of its past — including by creating a museum devoted to a notorious 1947 massacre — researchers say far fewer resources have been devoted to chronicling the decades of political repression under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party that ruled Taiwan as a one-party state from 1945 until Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election in 1996.

Academics say that little is known about the mechanics of repression under the Kuomintang, and that there has not been a thorough and transparent examination of the archives. Though researchers believe many records were destroyed, they also believe others have been kept from surfacing through willful neglect

“We know there are hundreds of thousands of records you can get access to, but there has been no systematic effort to go through them,” said Huang Chang-ling, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University. “What’s the percentage we have seen? It could be 10 percent or 90 percent. I have no idea, and I don’t think anyone does.”

After receiving the photocopied letters from her grandfather, Ms. Chang’s family pushed the government to return the original letters. The government balked at first, arguing that the documents belonged in the archive. In 2011, with the help of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, they were finally given to her family.

The association, a nongovernmental organization housed in a walk-up in central Taipei, collects letters and personal effects donated by relatives of those executed. Its chief executive, Yeh Hung-ling, hopes they can one day be displayed in a museum devoted to the White Terror.

Among the mementos are family photo albums that once belonged to executed prisoners. A number of prisoners decorated the books with ornately folded candy wrappers, using the materials they had to pass the time, Ms. Yeh said. Some of the letters are written in a pidgin Chinese, a reminder that many held in the Kuomintang prison where the Sheraton Grand Taipei sits today had only limited knowledge of written Chinese, the result of 50 years of Japanese colonization.

Most are short and formal, but their simple messages belie their importance to the families.

For Ms. Guo, the letters were a breakthrough in a life spent collecting clues about what happened to her father after he was taken away by the secret police when she was 3.

She said her mother harbored anger at her father for putting politics ahead of their family and risking everything by joining an underground Communist group.

“She was just 23,” Ms. Guo said. “She went from being a little girl attending school to getting married. It was a simple environment, and then the heavens crumbled. She kept thinking, why did you do this? Why did you leave the burden to me?”

The letter helped her mother forgive, but it arrived only at the end of her life, when her mind was failing.

In some cases, the letters have reopened emotional debates. Some scholars argue that people like Ms. Guo’s father were not unjustly persecuted, in his case because he joined a Communist group at a time when the Kuomintang was emerging from a decades-long war against the Chinese Communist Party.

Ms. Guo says that his Communism had no connection to China, and that it was a reaction to Kuomintang repression. Either way, she says, the most important thing is for records to be cataloged and released.

“For a long time people remained silent on this issue,” she said. “How much have we regressed as a society? So many people were killed and imprisoned, what effect does it have? These should all be up for discussion.”

For some families, such discussions are impossible. Ms. Chang’s grandmother died before she could see the letter from her husband, in which he told her to remarry. In a book about the letters, Ms. Chang’s mother contemplates the unknowable loss of a message never delivered:

“Six years a married woman, 56 years a widow. For her whole life, my mother never saw the letter and she never remarried. History has no ifs, but if the letter got to my mother the year it was sent, would she have had the same life?”

Owen Guo contributed research from Beijing.

Letters From the White Terror

http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160204/c04letters/en-us/

Letters From the White Terror

February 4, 2016

A letter by Liu Yao-ting, written from prison during the White Terror. Mr. Liu was executed in 1954. Billy H.C. Kwok for The New York Times

The following are excerpts of recently discovered letters written by prisoners of Taiwan’s political repression known as the White Terror. The prisoners were allowed to write letters to their families before they were executed.

Guo Ching

Executed in 1952

“A person has to die one day, please don’t be too heartbroken!”

To his wife.

Chiu Hsing-sheng

Executed in 1952

“It’s my last night and still I feel the same happiness I felt as a child. Why do I feel this way, such joy, just before my death, I don’t know. I always said I wouldn’t feel any dread before my death, and in fact it feels like I have finished my life’s burden and can relax. My outlook is resolute! I don’t feel any loss of hope. I am at ease with nature, and so feel only happiness about my death. So grandma, I wish you wouldn’t feel any pain on my account.”

To his grandmother.

Huang Wen-gong

Executed in 1953

“Before long I will leave this earth. I am trying to stay calm, to talk with you for the first and last time on this paper. I fear you can’t imagine what it’s like, alas. To face this moment and be unable to see you once, to hug you once, to kiss you once … I am heartbroken. My regret is unending.”

To his unborn daughter.

Uongu Yatauyongana

Executed in 1954

“Chun-fang whom I long for. How glad I am to know you are healthy and well. ‘No amount of gold, silver or gems are more precious than our darling children.’ Do you remember the song? As long as we have our homes and our land we will be fine, because there are so many amazing children. No matter if our possessions are confiscated, my innocence will be revealed….

In the fields and in the mountains, my spirit will always be.

Don’t give up the land!”

To his wife.

Liu Yao-ting

Executed in 1954

“My Yue-xia, you must listen to what I have to say. Even though we are apart, our hearts are connected. I deeply hope you can conquer all hardships, be brave, and not be heartbroken and lose health because of me.

Yue-xia, I’m sorry. It should be me who is looking after you and the children. This is also what I hope the most for the future. But at this moment I am incapable of doing this. Yue-xia, I hope deeply that you can forgive me.”

To his wife.

Cheng Jin-he

Executed in 1970

“On this earth you will never see your father again. This is the saddest thing. No one can avoid the pain of parting forever, but in this sorrow we must control our tears, we must swallow the bitterness and spit it out with laughter….

No matter whether it brings you joy or distress, you must not forget your mother and father. Now you have an even more important responsibility on your shoulders. In order to love your father you must improve yourself, only then can you comfort your father’s spirit. No matter what you do, you must engage in self-reflection often. This is what your father would have wanted.”

To his son.

Chan Tien-tseng

Executed in 1970

“Your son believes that people who die have a spirit. Your son is determined to come to your side every day to keep in touch. To see your peaceful eyes, to make sure you eat three meals a day. To comfort you when you are in pain or suffer. To wish you happiness every day.”

To his mother.

2009-07-10 TV Interview of Chang Yi-Lung about White Terror in Taiwan a...

With English subtitles

Part 1


Part 2

The Real Transitional Justice We Need

“Do not come to claim my body. I wish give it to the National Taiwan University College of Medicine or medical training institute. When I was a student, I learnt a lot of medical knowledge from practical autopsy. If this body can be autopsied by students, to increase their medical knowledge, to contribute to their medical knowledge, it would be much more meaningful.”

This except comes from my grandfather’s last letters, which were written to my grandmother before his execution in 1953. Unfortunately his dying wish was not realized. These five letters were not given to his family, but were filed with other documents and eventually sent into the National Archives Administration. In 2008, once access to these documents became possible, I began to apply for any papers related to my grandfather and we saw copies of these letters for the first time. However, by this time my grandmother was suffering with Alzheimer's, which prevented her from learning that her husband had written letters to her 56 years previously. 

Below I set out three appeals to the government, which I ask as a family member of a political prisoner.

Firstly: The government should survey and return any previously unreturned personal items automatically. This should not be left as the responsibility of relatives to make a claim, but should be the government’s responsibility to ensure they are returned. There may be many personal letters and personal items that are still kept by the government, which the victim’s families know nothing about. The Government should make a systemic survey of any remaining items and return them as a matter of course.

Secondly: Files from every administration should be better organised. A law about file transfer, after each administration is dissolved, should be established. The present situation is that all files and documents from every administration are filed in various locations and not sorted in one place. Information held about the people involved in the arrests and trials of the political prisoners should be published. It maybe that under current law we are unable to prosecute the original military judges and secret police, but we should have the right to know who did this. We want to know which cases were judged, and by whom, which cases were investigated, and by whom. The government should publish these data and exhibit them in a museum.  

Thirdly: There should be a real effort to admit the fault and make a proper apology. We do not need a meaningless apology issued by a president or other unrelated individual. This is an unusual situation, we only have victims but no perpetrator. I believe that some of the people involved are still alive. I wish to hear someone publicly apologize for what he did; which case he judged or person he tortured, and state clearly that this was wrong. My grandfather was a dentist who had studied in Japan, he was arrested a few years after he had returned to Taiwan and opened his clinic. The charge made by the Chinese Nationalist Party was rebellion and he was first sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. When the document was sent to Chiang Kai-shek, he changed the sentence to death. This decision to amend the sentence took my grandfather’s life. He was 33 years old. We believe that excepting Chiang Kai-shek, there must be other participants still alive. However, has anyone come to publicly apologize? Until now, nobody!  

The start

Since I can remember, my mother never talked about her father, my grandfather. I never felt that this was unusual. I never questioned something that had never really formed part of my life.

When I was in senior high school, I read one sentence from a book that my uncle published at that time. He wrote: “My father was shot by Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party).” This short sentence left me with a lot of questions. Who was my grandfather? What had happened to him? At this time, I still knew nothing about him. I determined that I would learn more, so I viewed my mother’s ID card, on which was written her parents name on the back. With this, I now knew his name, the first step.

A few years later, when I left home to go to university I found a letter that had been sent to my home. It came from the Foundation for the Dispensation of Compensation Relating to Wrongful Trials on Charges of Sedition and Espionage During the Martial Law Period. It recommended   the award of 60 compensation points, which was the highest points calculation for death. Also at this time, I found a book in my home. The book’s title was “A Kaohsiung County People’s History of the 228 Incident and the White Terror”. In that book, the 11^th victim had the same name as my grandfather. This provided another piece of the puzzle. The book only recorded the verdict and the official statement. Basically, I knew his execution date and place and that, before his arrest, he was the managing doctor working in the public health centre of the Chunrih township.

In 2007, there was an exhibition called “Goodbye, President Chiang”. It exhibited some documents that were adjudged by Chiang Kai-shek during the martial law. One of these exhibits was my grandfather’s file. In the original document, he was first sentenced to 15 years imprisonment. Then Chiang changed to death by a pen. He had had a chance to survival, but Chiang changed his world. Until 2007, we had not been privy to any of this information.

One year later, one of my friends suggested that I ask the National Archives Administration for the related dossier. After making my claim I received a file of more than 300 pages. There were five letters included in the file. Before that day, nobody in my family knew about these letters. The letters had been written to my grandmother and her three children and great aunt. The other documents were the court verdict, various other court documents and photos from before and after the execution. In those days, photographic evidence was required from all executions. The photos of all cases that Chiang Kai-shek viewed and judged were sent to him for review. He had asked to see the evidence that the executions had been carried out. Many people’s last images were recorded in this way and were kept secret until today.

When I gave the file to my mother, it was few days before her 58th birthday. She said that this was a belated 58th birthday present from her father, via her own daughter’s hand. She said that was the first time she felt her father had really existed and loved her, even though it was so late. My grandfather was arrested in September 1952, and my mother born in 3 months later. At the time he was executed, he had never had a chance to see his new born daughter.