The Taiwan That Was

"Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival 2014 in Taiwan" by Jirka Matousek is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Reminiscence

We tend to think Taiwan has always been a country much like our own. But history tells a different tale.

Today, Taiwan is a free and democratic country with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of travel, the right to peaceful assembly, and the right to vote. But a generation ago it was not that way. This, in part, is the Taiwan I lived in; a one-party state where none of the freedoms above existed in 1990, when I came to the country.

Having been born and raised in freedom, I lost all of that when I stepped into Taiwan. The first thing that defined this one-party state was to see statues all over the place of the former ROC (Republic of China, that is Taiwan's official name) President Chiang Kai-shek.

In the West, Chiang Kai-shek is seen by some as a Fascist dictator who murdered millions of his own countrymen (and was China's leader during the Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945). In Taiwan then, he was seen as a national hero and was beyond any criticism. Even though he had been dead for 15 years (he died in 1975), he remained an icon of the ruling Nationalist Party, and to criticize him was to criticize the Nationalist Party itself.

Radio, TV and the newspapers at the time were all controlled by the Nationalist Party (even if they were privately-owned). The international news more or less was uncensored. The slant, however, was that the rest of the world was "bad and violent." Even if the newspapers provided truthful news about what was happening outside the country, it was not the whole truth.

The whole point was to make the rest of the world (including the United States) look terrible while everything in Taiwan was "great." The domestic news just said everything good about what the Nationalist Party was doing, praising speeches by the President, the "ever-vigilant stance of the armed forces against the "Communists," and the impressive industrial and consumer output of the economy.

Crime was rarely ever reported, and government corruption was a taboo issue. Certain historical subjects were equally taboo. One in particular was the February 28, 1947 massacres which took place all over Taiwan. On that date, the Nationalist forces massacred an estimated 28,000 people for protesting against the government's polices. No public mention could ever be made then.

Speaking of Taiwanese TV, in my time there they had what I call propaganda-mercials. I will give three examples of these.

One was a propaganda piece about "how to avoid AIDS." The propaganda piece stated that homosexuality, having relations with "foreigners" (that made me uncomfortable), and playing with "infected animals" could give a person AIDS. The only way to avoid AIDS was to stay in a traditional family relationship and listen to the government for information on AIDS.

Then there was a propaganda piece stating that AIDS was spread by Thai prostitutes and that people should not go to Thailand (note: not very well-known, but Taiwan also had a lot of prostitutes and places of prostitution— the authorities looked the other way).

Finally, people had to be careful about "Communist spies." And this list does not include all of the Nationalist propaganda extolling the military, and how Taiwan had progressed under the Nationalist Party.

For two years, I lived in fear. If I said anything that could be considered "wrong," I feared I could be sent to prison.

The most infamous prison was the Jing-Mei Detention Center. It is estimated that between 3,000 to 4,000 were murdered there. (Note: the place was closed down in 1992, and the last political prisoner, Huang Hua, was released. It now stands as a museum and memorial to those who were slain).

But what could be considered a taboo subject? I had no idea, as I was a Westerner and there were many things that could offend the authorities, as well as people in general who might turn me in for saying something wrong. I saw military police at the train station take away young men either for "desertion" or (probably) because they needed another recruit to off-set their military manpower shortage. I heard of cases where young men of military age were not allowed out of the country for any reason.

What about foreign nationals like myself? I actually could not even get out of the country for a year because of bureaucratic tomfoolery. Just because I was a foreign national with a foreign passport did not mean I could just come and go. If I wanted to leave Taiwan, I had to go to my school and get an approval form. Then I had to take this to the tax office, and if they approved it then I had to take it to the foreign affairs police.

(I had to take it to the foreign affairs police myself, by the way. The authorities trusted no one. When I lived in South Korea, the school got me a multi-reentry visa and I did not have to go to the police or anyone else at all.)

I then had to sign an exit and a reentry register. Any of these procedures took as much as a week. If approved, I would get a special reentry visa put into my passport and an official rubber stamp added.

I had to do this every single time I wanted to leave the country.  At any point the whole process could come to a halt over a technical issue; you were effectively barred from leaving the country. It did not matter to them if you had an emergency back home, or if a family member was ill or dying.

Any transgressions were punished by a fine if you were very, very lucky. You also had to give an apology. A person, and it did not matter if a person was a foreign national, could be imprisoned for months, and even years. (I did not personally know what treatment in prison was like, but I wager it was not going to be good.)

I was far from being the only Westerner who dealt with this, but I was one of a handful who remained despite the conditions. Of the hundreds of Westerners whom I met over the years, they all left in a hurry.

Some left legally, but many did not. They were kicked out by the authorities, or they made what we called "the midnight run." Those Westerners trying to leave went as early in the morning as possible, paid a bribe, and got on the first available plane. I never attempted this (though I was tempted when I had a bad day) because I was afraid of being caught. I knew the consequences.

So, of the hundreds of Westerners who worked at our school, only four of us remained who stayed more than two years. Because of that we have remained close friends for the past 30 years.

Yet as awful as all of this sounds, I must state that one of the reasons why I remained as long as I did was because . . . well, it's complicated. That is a topic for another time.

Daniel Nardini spent 22 years as a newspaper correspondent for Lawndale News and The Fulton Journal. You can read more of his experiences in his books My Italian American Family, Rural Taiwan, and Lawndale News Memoirs and My Taiwan, Seoul, and Guadalajata (Mexico) Memoirs.

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The Modern Whig Institute is a 501(c)(3) civic research and education foundation dedicated to the fundamental American principles of representative government, ordered liberty, capitalism, due process and the rule of law.

Opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Institute or its members.