A Declaration of Independence

In the early autumn of 1964, the nights in Taipei felt suffocatingly still, as if even the wind had vanished beneath the weight of fear. Taiwan at the time lay buried beneath the iron curtain of martial law. Across the island, walls and alleyways were plastered with grim anti-espionage slogans, while newspapers and radio stations endlessly broadcast the regime’s political mythology of “retaking the mainland.” It was an era in which even private conversations about politics could invite imprisonment — or worse, the destruction of one’s entire family.

Yet inside a modest faculty residence at National Taiwan University, one solitary lamp remained lit deep into the night. Beneath the rhythmic clatter of a typewriter, sounding almost like coded transmissions, three intellectuals sat gathered around a table, quietly attempting to shatter the suffocating silence of their age.

They were men with every prospect of prestige and comfort within the system itself: Peng Ming-min, then only forty-one years old, a Paris-trained Doctor of Law and the youngest chair in the history of NTU’s Department of Political Science; his gifted student Hsieh Tsung-min, then serving as a magazine editor; and Wei Ting-chao, a young research assistant at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.

Together, these teacher and students were risking the single gravest political crime imaginable under the regime — sedition and conspiracy against the state, punishable by death — as they secretly drafted a document titled A Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation. Through reason and conscience, they sought to expose the political falsehoods that the party-state had maintained for fifteen years.

The intellectual roots of what would later become known as the Peng Ming-min Case emerged from the trio’s sober understanding of international reality. Since the Nationalist government’s retreat to Taiwan in 1949, the slogan of “recovering the mainland” had been treated as untouchable state doctrine. Yet Peng Ming-min, deeply familiar with the world of diplomacy and international law, understood that changing geopolitical realities had already rendered the dream politically impossible.

Night after night, the three men debated Taiwan’s future. Eventually they arrived at a radical conclusion for their time: Taiwan’s destiny could no longer be tied to the fantasy of reconquering China, nor could it remain trapped between the competing authoritarianisms of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang. Taiwan, they believed, had only one path left — self-salvation.

Drafted initially by Hsieh Tsung-min, revised by Wei Ting-chao, and finalized by Peng Ming-min, the declaration opened with words that struck like thunder:

“A powerful self-salvation movement is unfolding in Taiwan among people unwilling to submit to Communist rule and unwilling to be destroyed by Chiang Kai-shek.”

Unlike many overseas Taiwanese independence movements of the time, which often emphasized ethnic divisions between mainlanders and native Taiwanese, the declaration deliberately framed its arguments around civic nationalism, constitutionalism, human rights, and the rule of law. It asserted that “one China and one Taiwan” had already become an undeniable political reality, and it called upon all Taiwanese — regardless of provincial background — to unite in overthrowing the illegitimate regime, drafting a new constitution, and entering the United Nations under a new national identity.

Politically, the document was decades ahead of its era.

But within a Taipei saturated by informants and secret police, the plan to print ten thousand copies and distribute them by mail to influential figures across Taiwan was an almost impossible undertaking.

In mid-September 1964, Wei Ting-chao and Hsieh Tsung-min cautiously delivered the manuscript to a small printing shop in Taipei, taking elaborate steps to avoid surveillance. Fate, however, dealt the young intellectuals a devastating blow. As the printing workers watched the lead type emerge from the machines, phrases such as “overthrow the illegal regime” immediately filled them with terror. Fearing for their own safety, they secretly reported the matter to the Taiwan Garrison Command.

On September 20, 1964, the state struck with overwhelming force.

Security agents stormed the printing factory and confiscated all ten thousand copies of the declaration before a single one could be distributed. Hsieh Tsung-min and Wei Ting-chao were seized violently in the streets by plainclothes operatives, while that same night heavily armed agents surrounded the NTU faculty residences and forcibly arrested the soft-spoken Professor Peng Ming-min.

The three men were thrown into the notorious underground prisons of the Taiwan Garrison Command, where they endured endless interrogations, sleep deprivation, and brutal torture. The younger Hsieh and Wei suffered the harshest physical abuse, including electric shocks and forced water torture. During one interrogation, secret police agents beat out several of Wei Ting-chao’s front teeth, yet he continued trying to shoulder responsibility alone in order to protect the others.

As for Peng Ming-min — already an internationally respected legal scholar — intelligence officials alternated between threats and promises, pressuring him to sign confessions and statements of repentance. Yet before the military tribunal, Peng stood proudly and dismantled the charges with calm legal reasoning, insisting that democratization was the only path capable of saving Taiwan.

In April 1965, military prosecutors convicted the three men of preparing to overthrow the government. Hsieh Tsung-min received a ten-year prison sentence, while Peng Ming-min and Wei Ting-chao were each sentenced to eight years.

At first glance, the self-salvation movement appeared to have been crushed completely beneath the iron machinery of the authoritarian state. Yet Peng Ming-min’s arrest rapidly attracted international attention. American academics from numerous leading universities signed petitions demanding his release, while Amnesty International and foreign observers pressured Chiang Kai-shek’s government intensely. Concerned about preserving diplomatic legitimacy and continued American support, the regime took the extraordinary step of issuing a presidential pardon later that same year, releasing Peng from prison in November 1965.

But leaving prison did not mean freedom.

After his release, Peng was stripped of his academic position and placed under relentless surveillance. Dozens of plainclothes agents monitored his daily movements, effectively confining him under permanent house arrest.

His two students were far less fortunate. Though eventually released after reduced sentences, both would later be falsely implicated once again by security authorities following Peng Ming-min’s successful escape from Taiwan, leading to a second round of political imprisonment.

Living under suffocating surveillance, Peng eventually realized that remaining in Taiwan would almost certainly lead to his quiet disappearance at the hands of the regime. With the secret assistance of Japanese friends and foreign missionaries, plans were set in motion for a daring escape.

On January 2, 1970, taking advantage of slightly relaxed security during the New Year holiday, Peng disguised himself and used a forged Japanese passport to evade the intelligence services and board a flight bound for Japan. He later reached Sweden, where he obtained political asylum. The dramatic escape stunned Taiwan’s entire security establishment.

Though Peng Ming-min would remain in exile abroad for twenty-three years, the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation — never successfully distributed inside Taiwan in 1964 — nevertheless found wings of its own. Overseas Taiwanese students translated the document into English, and portions of it eventually reached international audiences through publications such as The New York Times, becoming one of the key texts through which the world came to understand Taiwan’s suppressed political aspirations.

Within Taiwan itself, the declaration’s ideas continued to flow underground like hidden magma beneath the island’s authoritarian surface. In the decades that followed, they nourished the rise of the Tangwai movement and became one of the indispensable intellectual foundations of Taiwan’s democratization.

Time has long since transformed the former underground prisons into today’s National Human Rights Museum, and the guilty verdicts against the three men have all been formally overturned. Yet when modern Taiwanese society looks back upon that grim autumn night in 1964, the sound of that late-night typewriter still seems to echo across history.

It reminds future generations that Taiwan’s democracy was never granted by those in power. It was illuminated instead by people like Peng Ming-min, Hsieh Tsung-min, and Wei Ting-chao — individuals willing to abandon comfort, status, and safety in order to sacrifice themselves for ideals larger than their own lives, leaving behind a beacon of courage and conscience for generations to come.