The Taiyuan Incident

February 8, 1970 — the third day of the Lunar New Year. Inside Taiyuan Reformatory Prison in Donghe Township, Taitung County, several hundred of Taiwan's political prisoners were being held, most of them young men serving heavy sentences handed down in the 1950s and 1960s for sedition or advocacy of Taiwanese independence. On that day, five of them — Cheng Chin-ho, Chan Tien-tseng, Hsieh Tung-jung, Chen Liang, and Chiang Ping-hsing — launched the only organized armed action ever attempted inside a prison in postwar Taiwan.

On paper the plan was complete: seize the guards' weapons, take control of the prison, then occupy the nearby radio station, broadcast across the island, declare Taiwanese independence, and call on mountain communities and Taiwanese conscripts in the armed forces to rise in support. They had spent months building the network, winning the acquiescence or active help of several Taiwanese guards. On the day itself, the five killed the guard sergeant Lung Jun-nien in the struggle — but the armory was never opened. Without weapons, every subsequent step lost its foundation.

The five fled into the Coastal Mountain Range. They had hoped to make contact with Amis communities and find shelter, but a large-scale military and police sweep of the mountains captured all of them within ten days. On May 30 of the same year, they were executed by firing squad at an execution ground on the outskirts of Taipei. A sixth man, Cheng Cheng-cheng, was judged to have been taken along under duress and escaped the death penalty, receiving a fixed prison term instead.

By military standards, the Taiyuan Incident did not succeed for a single minute. Yet it altered what followed on several levels. For the authorities, the action demonstrated that concentrating hundreds of political prisoners on the main island — where guards and inmates belonged to the same linguistic community — was an unacceptable risk. In 1972 the Ministry of National Defense built the Oasis Villa reformatory on Green Island and transferred political prisoners from across Taiwan to the offshore facility. The Taiyuan Incident is the direct reason Green Island became a synonym for political imprisonment.

In intellectual history, Taiyuan forms a pair with the 1964 Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation written by Peng Ming-min and his students. The same proposition, argued two ways: one side chose text and persuasion within the system, the other chose weapons and the willingness to be destroyed. Both failed within days, and both remained unspeakable in public for decades afterward. And in that single year of 1970, Taiwan had Taiyuan at home and, in April, the attempted assassination of Chiang Ching-kuo by Peter Huang and Cheng Tzu-tsai on a New York street abroad — actors half a world apart reaching the same conclusion in the same year: that waiting would not bring change.

The site of Taiyuan Prison remains a correctional facility today, the mountains and coastline unchanged. Green Island has become a human rights memorial park, the names of the victims carved into its walls. The names of these five men were sealed in classified files for decades. Their action woke no one at the time, because no one was permitted to know it had happened. Only later did history fill the gap: that in an era when even private conversation could be fatal, there were still people who judged a single chance at a radio broadcast worth their lives.