The Independent Taiwan Association Case and the End of Sedition
In the early hours of May 9, 1991, agents of the Investigation Bureau entered a graduate dormitory at National Tsing Hua University without the university's consent and took away Liao Wei-cheng, a student in the history institute. Arrested at the same time were Chen Cheng-jan, Wang Hsiu-hui, and Lin Yin-fu, an indigenous preacher. The accusation was that they had acted under the direction of the Independent Taiwan Association, founded by Su Beng from exile in Japan, to build an organization on the island. The statute invoked was Article 2, Paragraph 1 of the Statute for the Punishment of Sedition — a mandatory death sentence.
Four years had passed since the lifting of martial law, and fewer than three weeks remained before the Period of Mobilization would end. Most people believed the era of arrests in the night was over, and that night in the Tsing Hua dormitory proved it was not. Protest began on the campuses: Tsing Hua students boycotted classes and professors across the universities signed petitions. On May 12 students from across the country marched in Taipei against white terror, and afterwards thousands occupied the concourse of Taipei Main Station. It was the first time since martial law that anyone had used a national transport hub as a site of protest — and they stayed for days.
The Legislative Yuan moved with rare speed. On May 17 the Statute for the Punishment of Sedition was repealed on third reading, and the four defendants were released. Eight days from arrest to repeal. The special criminal law that had been in force since 1949 and had carried the entire White Terror was ended by a protest it had itself provoked.
But it was not finished. With the sedition statute gone, Article 100 of the Criminal Code remained in force: anyone who,…
But it was not finished. With the sedition statute gone, Article 100 of the Criminal Code remained in force: anyone who, intending to destroy the structure of the state, seize territory, alter the constitution by unlawful means or overthrow the government, "commences the act," faced not less than seven years, and preparation or conspiracy was punishable too. The crux was that "commencing the act" required no violence — writing an article, holding a meeting, forming an association could all be treated as commencement. Thought and speech were still criminal; only the article number had changed.
On September 21, 1991, the Article 100 Action Alliance was founded. Its convener was Lee Chen-yuan, seventy-six years old, an Academia Sinica member internationally known for his work on snake venom, who had never taken part in politics; with him were Lin Shan-tien of the National Taiwan University law faculty and Chen Shih-meng of its economics department. The demand fitted into two phrases: stop the parade, repeal the bad law. They timed their action for the National Day military parade of October 10, trained members in love and non-violence, and sat down in the basic medical sciences building of the NTU College of Medicine on October 8. In the early hours of October 10 the police cleared them out, carrying away one by one a group of white-haired professors and physicians.
On May 15, 1992, the Legislative Yuan amended Article 100 on third reading: the punishment of preparation and conspiracy was deleted, and the offense was narrowed to commencement "by violence or threat." Speech and association ceased to constitute sedition. Blacklists were dismantled and people who had been in exile for decades began to return — Peng Ming-min in 1992, Su Beng in 1993. Taiwan produced no new political prisoners after that.
From Kaohsiung to here, what thirteen years of opposition had won was not votes but something more basic: the removal of saying the wrong thing from the list of crimes. It left no photograph of a plaza. Its protagonists were a seventy-six-year-old academician and a group of professors being carried away, and the process is as dry as legal history. But if one has to name a legal starting point for freedom of expression in Taiwan, it is May 15, 1992.
The four of them did not know one another well. Chen Cheng-jan worked in social movements and research, Liao Wei-cheng was a graduate student in history at Tsing Hua, Wang Hsiu-hui helped out in activist circles, and Lin Yin-fu was a Bunun preacher. They had exactly one thing in common: each had had some contact with Su Beng in Japan — a book posted, a meeting, materials received. Under the law as it stood in 1991, that was enough to constitute membership of a seditious organization, and the penalty in that article was death. When they were taken, most of them assumed they would disappear for a long time, as the previous generation had. They walked out of detention eight days later, and what got them out was not their lawyers but several thousand people outside who did not know them. There was no precedent for such an ending in a Taiwanese political case: every earlier one had gone conviction, imprisonment, and then redress many years afterwards. Their names are seldom remembered now. What is remembered is that those eight days proved something — that if enough people move fast enough on the outside, the machine can be made to stop.
Isle of Time