The Miaoli Trials

In the winter of 1912 a Hakka man not yet thirty took ship from Guangdong back to Miaoli. Lo Fu-hsing had been born in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies, his family seat at Zhenping in Guangdong. He had come to Taiwan at seventeen with his grandfather, lived some years in Niulanhu village in Miaoli, and attended the Miaoli public school. Later he left the island to teach in the South Seas, and in 1911 he took part in the Canton rising at Huanghuagang and walked away from it alive. This time he came back with an assignment from the Chinese revolutionary alliance.

He chose Miaoli for more than familiarity. These were Hakka villages, thick with lineage networks, and this was also where the camphor trade and the guard lines had pushed hardest, where the forest survey had ruled one stretch of hill country after another to be state land. The grievance had been accumulating for over a decade. He hung out a signboard reading Chinese Citizens' Liaison Hall and enrolled members, and his pitch was plain: the mainland has changed its dynasty, and this place should change too. Enrolments went into a register. Some men paid money, others only signed their names.

The register was his most effective instrument and, in the end, his one fatal opening. Under the household registration system ten households made a chia and ten chia a pao, the pao headman answered to the police, and a strange face in a village was known the same day. In December 1913 Lo was arrested at Tamsui with the register on him.

The Government-General did not handle this as one case. In February 1914 a provisional court of the Government-General of Taiwan convened at Miaoli and tried together five unconnected conspiracies from the centre and north of the island: Lo at Miaoli, Chang Huo-lu at Dahu in Hsinchu, Lai Lai at Dongshijiao in Taichung, Shen A-jung in Nantou, and Li A-chi at Guandimiao in Tainan. The five sets of men did not know one another; the timing, the places and the scale all differed, and Lai's attempt had already failed and been broken up.

The advantage of joining them appeared on paper. The proceedings implicated 921 men and found 578 guilty, twenty of them capitally. A single judgment could then describe a net laid across the middle and north of the island rather than five local conspiracies each going its own way.

On 3 March 1914 Lo Fu-hsing was hanged at the Taipei prison, aged twenty-eight. In his cell he had written a short poem for the new republic, four lines of seven characters; read downward, the first character of each line spells out the name of the Republic of China. The poem was copied many times afterwards. Most of those who copied it had never read the judgment.

The name Miaoli Trials refers to where the court sat, not to where anything was raised. Of the five cases only one was actually plotted in Miaoli, and it ended before anyone acted. Miaoli was written into an event to which it had contributed a courtroom.