The Red Shirts and the Trial

2006 was the third year of Chen Shui-bian's second term. In May, the president's son-in-law, Chao Chien-ming, came under investigation for insider trading in Taiwan Development Corporation stock. Then came the state affairs fund — a presidential budget line designated for confidential diplomacy, which was found to have been settled with false receipts. On November 3 the Special Investigation Division indicted First Lady Wu Shu-jen and three others, and stated in the indictment that the president was implicated and was not being charged only because of his immunity while in office.

The opposition moved to recall him in June; the legislature gave 119 votes in favor, short of the two-thirds threshold. With the institutional route exhausted, Shih Ming-teh launched a campaign on August 12 asking a million people to pledge a hundred NT dollars each. It passed a hundred million within a week. From September 9 crowds in red sat on Ketagalan Boulevard; on September 15 they circled Taipei Main Station, and on the national day, October 10, they surrounded the area around the Presidential Office. In Taipei that autumn, red was a political position you could identify on the street.

The identity of the organizer made it harder. Shih Ming-teh had been the commander of the Kaohsiung Incident, had served twenty-five years in prison, and was the founding acting chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party. Twenty years earlier he had stood beside these people; twenty years later he stood opposite them, for the same stated reason: power has to be watched. Most of his old comrades did not accept the inference, and the quarrel became one of the least resolvable personal accounts in Taiwan's political history.

The campaign did not remove the president. Elections did the rest. In January 2008 the Kuomintang took eighty-one legislative seats; on March 22, Ma Ying-jeou won with 7.65 million votes, 58.45 percent. Power changed hands for the second time, and this time nobody doubted the count.

In August, Chen admitted to undeclared funds held overseas and left the DPP. On November 11 he was detained, the first former head of state in Taiwan to be held in custody; the panel of judges hearing his case was replaced in December, and the argument over that procedure ran for years. He received a life sentence at first instance in 2009, and in November 2010 the Supreme Court finalized the judgment in the Longtan land purchase case. He went to prison, and has been on medical parole since January 2015.

Over those years Taiwan completed two rather different things: it walked a former president into a courtroom, and it brought a street movement of a million people to an end without overturning a government. Both later became wounds for the camp that owned them, and they are rarely discussed together.