GREEN ISLAND ELEGY: HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE CHINESE WORLD
Paul Monk
Green Island lies just off the south east coast of Taiwan. For decades it was Taiwan’s most notorious place of incarceration for political prisoners. Built during the so-called White Terror of the early 1950s, it held thousands of political prisoners at one time. There were 14,000 there in the mid-1950s, according to official figures.[i] Thereafter, numbers declined, but the prison was not closed until after the end of martial law, in 1987. During that era, officially, 29, 407 people were imprisoned for political reasons. Unofficially, Guomindang figures have put the total at up to 70,000. According to none other than Wang Sheng, a leading figure in the Guomindang repressive apparatus for many years, the number executed was around 15 per cent of the total, or between 4,500 and 10,000 people. According to the Ministry of Justice, the execution files have long since been burned.[ii]
In the 1990s, a memorial was built on Green Island, to commemorate those imprisoned and executed in the harsh years before democratisation came to Taiwan. The memorial is simple and austere. Standing at its entrance, one can look out over the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and contrast its immense openness with the deadly confinement to which the memorial bears witness. Just past the entrance, descending into the court of the memorial, there is a long wall. On it are inscribed, in Chinese characters, the names of 750 prisoners whose records have been checked. Against the names of those executed there is a small mark. They are many.
Far from Green Island, in the heart of Taipei, there is another memorial to the victims of Guomindang repression: the 2/28 Peace Park and Museum. Here is commemorated the fearful bloodletting that occurred between 28 February and late March 1947, when the citizens of Taiwan rose up against misrule by mainlanders and were crushed in a brutal military operation by Chiang Kaishek’s armed forces. For decades the history of these events was politically suppressed by the Guomindang, but the Taiwanese did not forget and the Museum now records the general outline of what happened at that time.
For many mainlanders it is deeply upsetting to confront this history and there are some who still insist that it is not history, but Taiwanese nationalist propaganda. They are mistaken. There were many witnesses to the events at the time, not least among them the American diplomat, George Kerr, who set down accounts of what they saw.[iii] Taiwanese exiles kept the matter alive, claiming that 20,000 people had been massacred. In 1991, two Chinese and one American scholar published a detailed examination of the matter, in which they estimated that the number of deaths, almost all Taiwanese, was between 8,000 and 10,000.[iv] That was a conservative estimate. In 1995, the Guomindang itself apologised for the terrible excesses of 1947 and admitted that the number of Taiwanese killed in 1947 was between 18,000 and 28,000.[v]
These are numbing statistics. An equivalent level of bloodshed in Australia today would mean some 75,000 or more people being executed in a matter of weeks. Small wonder that even the pro-Guomindang Ramon Myers and his colleagues, in 1991, described the 1947 massacres as being followed by a ‘glooming peace’ which “covered Taiwan like a blanket of ashes laid down by a forest fire”.[vi] The Green Island memorial and the 2/28 Memorial Museum, however, make the dead more than statistics. They also rub away some of the numbness, by physically signifying that the truth has come out, that the cause has been vindicated and that repression as a means for resolving political differences has been repudiated. The ‘glooming peace’ has been supplanted by a vigorous green growth without further violent upheaval and the heirs of those executed in 1947 have taken office in recent years as the legitimate government of Taiwan.
This is a human rights story which should be much more widely known and understood than it is. It is a paradigm case of democratisation, which merits emulation in a world still grievously beset by ruthless political violence. It is a shining example, within the Chinese world, of what is possible when traditional authoritarianism and ideological bloodymindedness are replaced by magnanimity, imagination and principle. And it is, finally, a dramatic proof that human rights are not something confected by Western civilisation to interfere in the cultural and political domains of post-colonial states. They are fundamental and universal principles, without which barbarous violence and arbitrary government will both occur and go unchecked.
When Taiwan was handed back to the Chinese government in 1945, following the defeat of Japan in the Second World War, Taiwan was in excellent condition. The Japanese had been savage conquerors in China and elsewhere in Asia between 1937 and 1945, but in Taiwan, which they had taken from the Chinese empire in 1895, they had been immensely constructive colonial masters. They had developed rail and port infrastructure, industries and agriculture, education and public administration. Thousands of Taiwanese received good educations in Japan and played dignified roles in the life of the island under Japanese rule. In consequence, they found the contrast with Guomindang rule after 1945 a shock. It was especially a shock to them because they had hoped that the political philosophy of the Guomindang – Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People – would entail sound and democratic government.
By 1946, educated Taiwanese had invented a wry pun to characterise Guomindang rule. The San Min Chu-I (Three Principles of the People), they quipped, had turned into Ts’an-min Chu-I (Cruel Personism).[vii] Nothing the Japanese had ever done in Taiwan prepared the Taiwanese for what happened, however, when they rebelled against their mainland rulers. The civil war between the Guomindang and the Communists had just entered its final phase in February 1947 and the Guomindang acted ruthlessly to root out opposition on their southern flank in Taiwan. Thousands of regular troops were put ashore at Keelung and Kaohsiung. They came ashore shooting indiscriminately, then proceeded to round up and slaughter hundreds of civic leaders and thousands of ordinary citizens.
Not least among the victims were countless idealistic young students. George Kerr wrote, “We saw students tied together, being driven to the execution grounds, usually along the river banks and ditches about Taipei, or at the waterfront in Keelung. One foreigner counted more than thirty young bodies – in student uniforms – lying along the roadside east of Taipei; they had had their noses and ears slit or hacked off and many had been castrated. Two students were beheaded near my front gate. Bodies lay unclaimed on the roadside embankment near the Mission compound…For days the dead continued to be washed up in Keelung Harbor…The atrocities perpetrated at Kaohsiung were (if possible) even more revolting than the mass executions and torture used at Taipei…”.[viii]
The White Terror did not involve massacres on this scale. It lasted longer, but was more discriminating in its suppression of opposition to the Guomindang[ix]. It began in 1949, as Chiang Kaishek’s Guomindang fled from defeat on the mainland and sought to both consolidate their hold on the island against the Taiwanese and to root out real or suspected Communist infiltrators in their chaotic ranks. It was in these years that the Green Island prisons were built and filled. It was a process wretchedly similar in character to what was happening on the mainland at the same time, as Mao Zedong’s Communists purged the country of counter-revolutionaries, warlords, Guomindang officers and officials and feudal reactionaries. It can have been no consolation to the Taiwanese to have known, if indeed they did, that things were even worse on the mainland. And this remained the case throughout the 1950s and 1960s, while Chiang Kaishek was alive.
Of the thousands of cases of repression from that era, those of Lei Chen, Su Ting-chi and Peng Ming-min are almost paradigm cases of political persecution. Lei Chen was a leading liberal journalist who was arrested in 1961, along with three colleagues, for advocating clean and fair elections. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for this heinous offence. When a young student, Su Ting-chi, organised a petition for clemency on his behalf, he was arrested, tortured, tried for sedition and executed, in May 1962. His wife was sentenced to life imprisonment for refusing to denounce him. Peng Ming-min, a brilliant young, Japanese educated political scientist at National Taiwan University, was arrested in 1964 for appealing to all the people of Taiwan, both Taiwanese and mainlanders, to work together to establish a democratic state.[x] He and two of his students were sentenced to prison terms of from eight to ten years.
These case histories provide a sense of perspective. They invite searching comparisons with the persecution of democratic dissidents in China right up to the present. The dissent of Lei Chen and Peng Ming-min in the early 1960s directly anticipated the dissent of Liu Binyan, Fang Lizhi, Wei Jingsheng and many, many others in China one or two decades later.[xi] Lei, Su and Peng were not firebrands but individuals who sought to make the Guomindang live up to and fulfil its charter to bring democracy, not dictatorship, to the Chinese world. It was in exactly this spirit that Wei Jingsheng, imprisoned by Deng Xiaoping for declaring that without democracy there is no modernisation, challenged the Communist Party throughout the 1980s and 1990s.[xii]
The core problem all of these individuals faced, whether under the Guomindang or the Communists, was the repressive nature of Chinese political culture, its inveterate lack of recognition of the dignity of the individual and the rights of the citizen. Bo Yang, a mainlander who fled Communism in the 1940s and then ended up being gaoled by the Guomindang on Taiwan in 1967, for ‘defaming the leadership’, is now the director of the Human Rights Education Foundation in Taipei. In 1984, following his release from Green Island, he delivered a speech at Iowa University, in the United States, which was later published under the title The Ugly Chinaman. His reflections in that speech still cannot be openly published in China, but have gone through numerous reprints in democratic Taiwan.
“During my incarceration”, he reflected, “I spent a lot of time contemplating my fate. What crimes had I committed? What laws had I broken? I continued pondering these questions after I was released and began to wonder whether mine was an abnormal or special case.” Mainlanders he met in America, who had escaped Communist China, told him ‘Someone like you would never have made it as far as the Red Guards or the Cultural Revolution. You’d have been lucky to survive the Anti-Rightist Movement’. Given the antiquity and richness of Chinese civilization, Bo Yang found this a dismal reality at the end of the twentieth century. “Why”, he asked, “must a Chinese person with the courage to speak an iota of truth suffer this sort of fate? I’ve asked a number of people from the mainland why they ended up in prison. The answer was invariably, ‘I spoke the truth’… But why does speaking the truth lead to such unfortunate consequences? My answer is that this is not a problem of any particular individual but rather of Chinese culture as a whole.”[xiii]
We now know better. We know that the lack of human rights has a long history in China, but that it is neither peculiar to Chinese culture, nor ineradicable within Chinese culture. We also know that the change from abuse of human rights to systematic respect for them can be brought about constitutionally and peacefully from within a Chinese polity. We know that individual Chinese citizens, free of prompting by any external power and proceeding only on the basis of reason and experience and the few good examples on offer around the world, can both aspire to such rights and bring them into being. We know this because it has happened on Taiwan. The big breakthrough has yet to come in mainland China, but the time has passed when any sort of cultural fatalism or ideological rationalisation can serve to excuse the abuses still practised by the Chinese Communist Party. The Guomindang, which it defeated in the violence stakes long ago, has shown it a clean pair of heals in the democratisation stakes since the death of Chiang Kaishek.
The breakthrough on Taiwan is, therefore, of world historical significance. No single aspect of it, however, is quite so remarkable as the fact that it was initiated by none other than Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of the old dictator and for many years one of the chief guardians of his dictatorship. In his pathbreaking biography of the younger Chiang, Jay Taylor, has done an immense service to the cause of historical transformation in Chinese political culture. In it, Taylor tells a story that few people can have known through all the years when Chiang Ching-kuo ruled the Republic of China on Taiwan, whether as his father’s regent between 1955 and 1975 or in his own right until his death in January 1988. It is a story of deep political learning under the most testing of circumstances. It should become required reading in every Chinese home and in every place where the effort is being made to think through the modernisation and democratisation of Chinese political culture.
Chiang Ching-kuo was a contemporary of Deng Xiaoping and if Plutarch himself were to write a modern, global Parallel Lives, as he did of Greek and Roman statesmen long ago, then Jay Taylor has shown that he would have to parallel these two lives. The two were classmates together in Moscow in 1926, learning to be good Communists. Chiang’s girlfriend in Moscow was the daughter of the warlord Feng Yu-hsiang, for whom Deng went to work on his return to China. Deng organised the Anti-Rightist campaign for Mao Zedong in the 1950s, while Chiang Ching-kuo organised the White Terror and the Green island ‘New Life Institute’ for his father at the same time. Both saw the need for reform in the early 1970s, but could do little at that time.[xiv] Deng imprisoned Wei Jingsheng in 1979-80, even as Chiang imprisoned Shih Ming-te and Annette Lu.[xv] But then the astounding break came: Deng recoiled from democratic liberalisation in the 1980s, while Chiang embraced it. Deng turned against his enlightened liberal heirs apparent, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, while Chiang ushered his, Lee Tenghui, into office[xvi]. And so, as the new century opened, peaceful democratisation took place in Taiwan, with the Guomindang conceding ground in successive clean elections, while in China the breakthrough has not come and the Communist Party clings to power.
It was the confident view of leading Guomindang liberal Shaw Yu-ming, in 1985, that China could and would reform itself. It was the conviction of the recalcitrant Iron Blood Patriots, hardline Guomindang rightists, at the same time, that Chiang Ching-kuo had gone soft on the democratic opposition. He should, they asserted bitterly, have done what his father would have done – thrown the democratic oppositionists “into the sea”. Chiang Ching-kuo, raised as a Leninist, tempered as a Stalinist, seasoned as an anti-Communist secret police chief, chose instead, at the end of a long political life, to throw Leninism into the sea. And when his old classmate, Deng Xiaoping, wrote to him in the last decade of his life, urging that they work together to reunify China, he replied that, while China remained as it was, this would mean “pouring spoiled wine into old bottles”. The Chinese people, he declared to Deng’s messengers,[xvii] were sick of Communism. They aspired, in its place, to freedom, democracy and prosperity. He could not give these things to China, but he did give them to Taiwan and, in doing so, he set a wonderful example to his old classmate Deng Xiaoping. But Deng could not find it in himself or his Party, in his last years, to follow that example.
In 1988, a six part TV miniseries was screened in China, to great popular acclaim. It was called River Elegy. In it, the argument was advanced that Chinese political culture faced a profound choice. It could cling to all the imperial traditions symbolised by the Yellow River, which was drying up, and the Great Wall, which was an old ruin representing unsuccessful defensiveness against the outside world. Or it could look to the deep blue sea, from which the democracy and science and industry of the modern world had come and embrace an open future instead of a xenophobic past. The Communist Party reacted badly to the program and it was suppressed even before the disastrous events of June 1989. Like Bo Yang, however, the makers of that TV series were speaking the truth. It is a truth whose time has come and which might best be expressed in a new TV miniseries called Island Elegy.
Island Elegy would take up where River Elegy left off. It might begin with the statement by Yao Chia-wen, then Chairman of theDemocratic Progressive Party, in 1988: Taiwan is not part of China, but an island which stands at the intersection of the world’s greatest continent and the world’s greatest ocean. At that intersection, Taiwan now embodies the challenge to China and everything regressive in its political culture that Bo Yang identified in his 1984 speech in Iowa. A precise measure of whether China is able to rise to that challenge will be the manner in which it chooses to deal with the island in the next decade or two. Will it, like the Guomindang in the 1940s and 1950s, seek to impose its will by force and censorship? Or will it, like Chiang Ching-kuo in the 1980s, give up Ts’an-min Chu-I for San Min Chu-I, give up threats and recognise the rights, dignity and freedom of the opposition? Gazing out from the memorial on Green Island at the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean, one can see that the better of these choices is possible for the Communist leadership, as it was for the Guomindang leadership. The greatest task in the Chinese world in the years ahead is to draw them in that direction.
[i] Jay Taylor The Generalissimo’s Son: Chiang Ching-kuo and the Revolutions in China and Taiwan, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 212.
[iii] George H. Kerr Formosa Betrayed, Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1966, esp. Ch XIV ‘The March Massacre’
[iv] Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers, Wei Wou A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of 28 February 1947, Stanford University Press, 1991, pp. 164-66.
[v] Jay Taylor op. cit., p. 148.
[vi] Lai Tse-han, Ramon Myers, Wei Wou op. cit. p. 193.
[vii] Murray Rubinstein (ed) Taiwan: A New History, M. E. Sharpe, New York, 1999, p. 291.
[viii] George H. Kerr op. cit. pp. 300-303.
[ix] Ho Ching-t’ai White Archives, Taipei, 1991. Lan Po-chou The White Terror, Taipei, 1993, both published only in Chinese, provide detailed overviews of the period, including oral histories of both Taiwanese and mainland political prisoners.
[x] Peter Chen-main Wang in Murray Rubinstein op. cit. p. 335.
[xi] For an excellent introduction to the democratic movement in China, see Merle Goldman Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era, Harvard University Press, 1994.
[xii] Wei Jingsheng The Courage To Stand Alone: Letters From Prison and Other Writings, Viking Penguin, 1997.
[xiii] Geremie Barme and John Minford (eds) Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1989, p. 171.
[xiv] In 1972, Chiang Ching-kuo “told his cabinet that the Chinese people had suffered thousands of years of arrogant treatment from officials”. He told the US Ambassador, in 1973, that he was committed to a more open society, which would contrast favourably with China’s closed society. Taylor op. cit. pp. 311, 313.
[xv] Annette Lu remained in prison until 1987. She is now the Vice-President of Taiwan.
[xvi] According to Taylor (op. cit. p. 379), Chiang decided “before the end of 1983” that “his successor would be a native Taiwanese.”
[xvii] The chief go between, from 1980 to 1987 was none other than Lee Kuan Yew, who became a close friend and confidant of Chiang Ching-kuo in these years. Taylor op. cit. pp. 382-84.
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