The Constitutional Convention

On November 15, 1946, the National Constituent Assembly opened in Nanking, and seventeen delegates elected from Taiwan sat for the first time in a Chinese national chamber. Their backgrounds say a good deal about the island: Lin Hsien-tang had spent more than twenty years petitioning for a Taiwanese parliament; Nan Chih-hsin, a Puyuma, was Taiwan's first indigenous physician trained in Western medicine and attended as a representative of indigenous people; Lin Lien-tsung of Changhua was a lawyer and also a provincial councilor; Chang Chi-lang, a doctor from Fenglin in Hualien, paid his own way north after raising an arch in his home town inscribed with words of welcome to the motherland. Most had been educated in Japanese, and parliamentary procedure, legal vocabulary, and the official speech of the hall all had to be learned on the spot. The demand they carried came down to one thing: provincial and county self-government. The Taiwanese delegates argued for writing local autonomy into the text concretely and irreversibly, so the island could elect its own governor and manage its own finances; that left a framework for local government in Chapter XI of the Constitution — and also left one clause requiring a general statute on provincial and county self-government. Without the statute, no autonomy. The Constitution passed its third reading on December 25 and the delegates went home with a basic law they had helped write. Three months later Lin Lien-tsung was taken away in Taipei and never seen again; on April 4, Chang Chi-lang and two of his sons were taken and shot at Fenglin. Part of the roll of the constitution-makers and part of the roll of the dead of February 28 are the same names.