Real Life Real Time History

I had a most extraordinary experience when I traveled recently to Taiwan with my wife, Judith Thomas. I learned of her courage in an earlier part of her life and was introduced in one fascinating week to a portion of the drama and excitement of recent Chinese history and culture.

Judith and I traveled to Taiwan, along with Judith's three adult children and their father [Judith's ex-husband] Milo Thornberry. We went as guests of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, a private organization funded by the Taiwan government. The TFD hosted a weeklong program honoring "Foreigners Who Made a Difference in the Democratization of Taiwan." I went along to carry the luggage and be helpful, and ended up with a new view of my wife of twenty-two years.

The trip came at an especially interesting time: the simultaneous beginning of the run-up to the Taiwan Presidential election in March 2004; the dust-up over the proposed referendums for that election accompanied by another round of military threats to Taiwan from Beijing; plus the visit of Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Washington seeking the U.S. government's support for the mainland's continuing effort to assert its sovereignty over the island of Taiwan.

Let me begin the story with excerpts from a letter that Judith wrote to our friends shortly after our return from Taiwan.

Milo and I spent five years in Taiwan from 1966-1971 as Methodist missionaries. We were assigned to teach at Taiwan Theological College, a school founded by the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan. At that time, the government was ruled by the Kuomintang (KMT) party, headed by Chiang Kai-shek, the general who lost the Chinese Civil War to the Communists in 1949. After the loss, he and his armies retreated to Taiwan, where he continued to claim himself head of all of China. This fiction enabled the government to put off the democratic elections called for by the 1947 Constitution and to maintain a state of martial law for 38 years (1949 to 1987), a period longer than that of any other country post-WWII. That period is now referred to by the Taiwanese as the "White Terror," a time when anyone could be arrested at will by the authorities, tortured, tried in secret, and executed or sentenced to a long jail term.

When Milo and I arrived in Taiwan, we already knew something about the oppressive nature of the government. Seeing it up close was another matter. Over time, Milo and I worked with a few other like-minded people on two important projects: (1) We put together a packet of information about Taiwan to give to visiting foreigners who wanted to hear other than the government view of things. We also opened our home for meetings between such foreigners and Taiwanese dissidents who were willing to talk about their views on Taiwan. (2) We set up a project to identify political prisoners and get their names to Amnesty International for follow-up on their cases. We also collected money from various sources, including the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker Organization. These we distributed to the families of political prisoners, who were typically cut off from any financial aid or legitimate means of making a living.

I was involved in one other rather dramatic activity: Milo and I coordinated the escape of Dr. Peng Ming-min, a prominent legal scholar and professor at the National University, who was arrested as a dissident in 1964 and released after six months because of protests from scholars around the world. We became good friends shortly after our arrival in Taiwan, even though he was still under a form of house arrest that meant he was followed by secret police whenever he went out. After he came under intense pressure from the police in 1969, including threats on his life, we urged him to consider leaving Taiwan and he agreed. There was no hope that the government would allow him to leave legally; the only recourse was some kind of clandestine departure. We had no experience with such an undertaking, but we ultimately were able to come up with a plan to help him leave Taiwan safely. So far as we know, the KMT government knew nothing about this activity until the mid-1990s, when I acknowledged it publicly just before Peng returned to Taiwan for the first time since his escape.

In early March of 1971, we were arrested by the Foreign Affairs Police and deported on order of the KMT-controlled government. The charges against us were not specified; rather, the arresting officers said we were accused of an "unfriendly attitude and actions" toward the government. We were given 48 hours to leave the country, were forbidden contact with anyone other than the mission representatives who needed to arrange for our departure, and had four guards (two men and two women) sitting in our living room the entire time until we left for the airport.

Having to leave Taiwan so abruptly changed the course of my life significantly. Working in China was not an option in 1971, and neither was Hong Kong, whose government was inclined to view me as a troublemaker — this was during the Vietnam War, when HK was struggling with US student dissidents there. My Chinese language ability languished, and I started graduate school at Columbia in a sociology program that focused on other issues. It was as if one pathway ended abruptly, forcing my feet onto a new and very different one. That break was reinforced when Milo and I ended our marriage five years after our deportation.

Then, more than 30 years later, I received the invitation to return to Taiwan with all expenses paid. The TDF invited about 30 persons from the US, Canada, England, Japan, and Holland to return for a weeklong celebration of the same activities that had resulted in many of us being asked to leave or denied reentry to the country. It was an opportunity to come round full circle."
"Real Life Real Time History"

By Jerry Griffin
Page 2
Let me [Jerry] pick up the story here with a partial listing of our activities during that busy week in Taiwan. Among other things, we were treated to:

a formal banquet where each of the participants had their contributions described and received an award plaque, with many of the presenters former political prisoners;
a luncheon celebration with several friends hosted by Peng Ming-min, who returned to Taiwan after 24 years' exile, ran unsuccessfully for President of the country but is now a Senior Advisor to President Chen Shui-bian;
a meeting at the Presidential Palace with President Chen, followed by a banquet hosted by Vice-President Annette Lu;
a two-day conference devoted to the guests telling their stories (simultaneous translations included) and being honored — interrupted more than once by people who had been victimized by the KMT and are still seeking justice and truth and reconciliation;
a Human Rights concert in a large Taipei park, at which Milo and Judith were presented by Peng Ming-min and asked to speak (and were cheered exuberantly);
three or four fetes at which we were entertained with aboriginal dances and singing, explosions of rose petals and confetti, politicians singing and playing musical instruments, small chamber orchestras, church choirs, and so on;
a train trip to a human rights and democratization museum started by Lin Yi-hsiung, a lawyer and activist who was unjustly arrested in 1980. The museum is a memorial to his mother and twin seven-year-old daughters who were murdered — widely assumed to be by government thugs — while he was in prison. He and his wife met and spoke with us. It was incredibly moving;
a plane trip to the south of the island and back, with bus tour stops at a dairy farm, an aboriginal village, and the home of the 1968 Little League team (mostly aboriginal tribal members) whose exploits began Taiwan's decades of dominance of the Little League World Championships — although that team didn't win the World Championship, the incorrect memories of many Taiwanese notwithstanding;
two TV interviews for Milo and Judith, one of which was the taping of a sort of Taiwanese Charlie Rose show (only a lot more fun), in which their eldest daughter Liz also participated;
several newspaper articles about our group, including two that focused on Milo and Judith, one in Chinese and the other in English;
meetings with many representatives of the Presbyterian Church of Taiwan, which played a major role in the movements of the 1970s and 1980s that resulted in the current state of freedom and democracy in Taiwan. These included Reverend Kao, former Moderator of the church, who spent several years in jail. In Taiwan he is compared to Nelson Mandela because of his integrity and rectitude in prison. It is said that he was released from prison early because he kept converting his fellow prisoners and even the guards

Every minute of the trip for me was memorable. The highlights included: meeting people who spent years in prison, sometimes undergoing brutal torture; getting to better understand, appreciate and admire what Judith had done; seeing the love and gratitude that those prisoners have for people like Judith who helped them survive; and meeting many Americans, Canadians, Dutch and Japanese who were moved to take actions for which they were expelled from the country.

Several small incidents demonstrated the significance that the people of Taiwan attach to the history of their democratic and human rights movements: after several TV and newspaper interviews, Judith began to be recognized on the streets of Taiwan and to be thanked by groups of people. At one point our taxi driver even refused his tip when he realized who Judith was.

Just after we returned to the States, the National Archives released the verbatim transcripts of the talks between Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Prime Minister Chou En-lai in Beijing in 1972. It was odd to read Chou En-lai's angry accusation of U.S. complicity in the escape of Peng Ming-Min, and the U.S. denial, during which Kissinger said that he suspected the escape was the work of "American anti-Chiang Kai-shek left wing groups." Judith rejects the "left wing" characterization but proudly accepts the description of "anti-Chiang Kai-shek"!

I was saddened by my own ignorance of the modern history of Taiwan — ignorance that apparently I share with most fellow Americans. The trip gave me a new understanding of the continuing process of democratization in places like Taiwan, with its twenty-three million people trying their best to get it right.

I wrote the above in mid-February, 2004, a month before the Presidential elections and referendum vote that took place on March 20. As it turned out, Chen Shui-Bian and his Democratic Progressive Party were re-elected by a tiny margin — about 2/10 of one percent. The outcome was muddied the day before the election by an unsuccessful assassination attempt in which the President and his Vice President both sustained gunshot wounds.

There followed a period of unrest and protests — led by the unsuccessful candidates — that is only now subsiding. The opposition KMT and PFP parties filed lawsuits seeking a recount, annulment of the election, a new election, or even a judicial declaration that they, not the DPP, had won the election. They claimed that the assassination attempt had been staged in order to get a sympathy vote, that a national state of alert following the attempt had prevented many members of the military from voting, and that voting irregularities had caused the DPP victory.