The White Shirts and Hung Chung-chiu

Hung Chung-chiu was a corporal in the 542nd Brigade of the Sixth Army Corps, born in 1989, a graduate of National Cheng Kung University, and due to be discharged on July 6, 2013. At the end of June he was sent to detention barracks for bringing a camera-equipped phone into his unit. On the afternoon of July 3 he was put through physical training in the detention block at the Gaoshanding camp in Yangmei; the temperature that day was above thirty-five degrees. He collapsed partway through, was taken to hospital, and died the next day. The cause was disseminated intravascular coagulation brought on by heat exhaustion.

The military's first account was that procedure had been followed. Then came a run of details that did not line up: the approval process for the detention, the record of his medical examination, and surveillance footage from the critical hours that "could not be read for technical reasons." The family held press conferences, and his sister, Hung Tzu-yung, stood in front of the cameras and went through the questions one at a time. Understanding them required no expertise, which is why they spread so fast online.

In July a group calling itself the Citizen 1985 Action Alliance appeared. Its founders were some thirty strangers from the internet, mostly office workers and engineers, with no party affiliation and no intention of forming an organization. On July 20 they called people to the Ministry of National Defense, and thirty thousand came. For August 3 on Ketagalan Boulevard they asked people to wear white; the organizers put the crowd at 250,000. There were no banners that night and no party sound trucks, and the ground was clean afterward — points raised repeatedly since, because they proved a mass assembly could be convened by none of the existing forces.

The legislature moved with unusual speed. On August 6 it passed amendments to the Military Trial Act sending offenses by serving personnel in peacetime to the ordinary courts, which in practice suspended military justice outside wartime. Thirty-four days passed between a death and a change in the law.

The courts did not keep pace. Military prosecutors indicted eighteen people, and the judgments over the following years were largely suspended sentences or acquittals, which the family has never accepted. Hung Tzu-yung was elected to the Legislative Yuan in 2016.

The movement had no clear political demand and no leader who could be co-opted or discredited. It asked for one thing: an account of why a man had died inside the army. Eight months later a great many of the same people were on the street outside the legislature.