The White Terror

On May 20, 1949, the Taiwan Provincial Government declared martial law, initiating thirty-eight years of authoritarian rule that would bracket the island's post-war history and define the political reflexes of three generations. Within weeks of the declaration, the Taiwan Garrison Command assumed sweeping jurisdiction over civilians through military courts; a month later, the enactment of the "Statute for the Punishment of Sedition" and the "Statute for the Detection and Eradication of Communist Spies" provided the legal scaffolding that would justify four decades of extrajudicial detention, summary trial, and capital punishment, all under the legal framework of the "Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of Communist Rebellion."

Under this framework, the KMT government launched massive political purges targeting dissidents, leftist intellectuals, trade unionists, literary circles, returned overseas students, and even entire village associations caught up in manufactured "organizational cases," all under the pretext of "preventing communist infiltration." The intelligence architecture that carried out these purges was deliberately multi-headed and competitive: the Taiwan Garrison Command, the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice, the Political Warfare Department of the Military, and Chiang Ching-kuo's personal network in the Intelligence Bureau frequently investigated each other's informants and duplicated each other's files, producing a culture of mutual denunciation in which a careless letter, a classroom discussion, or a study group reading Lu Xun could escalate into a sedition indictment.

Beginning in the early 1950s, thousands of Taiwanese were arrested, tried, imprisoned, and even executed on charges of "espionage" and "sedition." Political prisons at Green Island, Jingmei, and Taiyuan became the most painful witnesses of this era. The Green Island concentration camp at its peak housed over two thousand political prisoners in stone barracks ringed by barbed wire; the Ma-chang-ting execution ground at Liuzhangli received truckloads of prisoners in the dawn hours of June 1950 during the single largest execution wave of the era. Many trials lacked due process, defense counsel was restricted or token, confessions were often extracted through torture, and verdicts were frequently returned within twenty-four hours of arraignment.

This volume presents how the White Terror systematically destroyed an entire generation of Taiwanese intellectuals and social activists through testimonies of political victims, military tribunal verdicts, the chilling rehabilitation certificates issued decades later by the Transitional Justice Commission, and recently declassified intelligence agency documents — and how its shadow, long after martial law itself was lifted, continued to shape family silences, career choices, and the structural asymmetries of Taiwan's democratic society.