How Far Would You Go to Avoid Certain Torture and Execution?

Taiwan has been prominent in the news lately due to national elections and how election results may have increased the threat of war from China. What the press has not talked about, but what is important to know, is that the people of Taiwan have suffered greatly in their recent history. The story of Shih Ju-chen can stand as a grim and ghastly metaphor for the lives that the Taiwanese experienced from the end of World War 2 until the nineties. First, here is some background.

When European colonizers arrived during the Age of Exploration, the island now known as Taiwan was occupied mostly by indigenous tribes and some Chinese settlers. To this day 2% of the population is still made up of 16 differing indigenous ethnic groups. The Portuguese were the first Europeans to see the island, which they passed by, but they called it a name that stuck for a while: Ilha Formosa (Beautiful Island).

The Dutch ultimately took control, forcing Spain away, and controlled the island from 1624 – 1683, until the Qing Dynasty of China defeated the Dutch East India Company and began formally governing the island. After the First Sino-Japanese War, which China lost, Taiwan was forcibly ceded to Japan in 1895. Japan, however, lost control of the island in 1945, after losing World War II, and it was returned to China and occupied by soldiers and civilian followers of Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jie-shih).

Chiang was the leader of the Nationalist Chinese “Kuomintang” (KMT), who were considered the “official” Chinese government at the end of World War II.  Chiang would, however, lose a civil war to Mao Zedung and his People’s Liberation Army, taking gold supplies and priceless artwork and slipping into Taiwan to set up his own government there. Until the 1970s, it was Chiang’s government that represented China in the UN, even though he was the military dictator of less than 20 million people.

When the KMT army landed to occupy Taiwan, the inhabitants were shocked and disgusted. People said that Chiang’s army looked like a bunch of rag-tag homeless guys, and that even Japanese occupation seemed preferable to being occupied by these types of folks. Indeed, many Taiwanese had learned the Japanese language, fought along with Japan in the war, and felt that their island had benefitted from Japanese rule economically and technologically. To this day, there is a distinctly Japanese aura in Taiwan.

Even before Chiang was forced to vacate mainland China in 1949 (after losing to Mao), a KMT political hack named Chen Yi had started to do the KMT dirty work in Taiwan. He established a government of folks loyal to the KMT, making the folks who had been living in Taiwan feel isolated, realizing the Japanese may have been forced to leave but that Taiwan was now occupied by another, and perhaps worse, oppressor.

Under Chen, government-run monopolies led to a worsening economy characterized by massive inflation (especially for rice) and wide-spread unemployment. Folks who had been living in Taiwan before the arrival of the KMT found they had few rights and no chance to participate meaningfully in government or the bureaucracy.

Then, on February 28, 1947, a woman from the Puyuma indigenous people was attacked by KMT police after an argument with them over the illegal cigarettes she was selling to make a living in Taipei. A crowd assembled during the argument and a riot ensued in which many people were shot and killed. Thus began the White Terror, which lasted until 1987.

Much like the later Arab Spring of 2010, but with more negative consequences, the people spontaneously rose up against the government. They were brutally suppressed. There were wide-spread killings, arrests and gratuitous executions. Because the KMT was so incompetent, and so bad at record keeping, historians are not even sure how many Taiwanese civilians died as a result of the 228 Incident. The guess is between 18,000 and 28,000 dead. Then Chiang lost his war to Mao and fled to Taiwan to make matters even worse.

Chiang created a ruthless and vicious type of systemic oppression, involving fear, intimidation, abuse of power, torture and murder to keep people pacified through terror. For a while he foolishly believed he could regroup and launch an attack on the mainland to recover the territory he had lost in the civil war. His US overlords put a nix to that idea. Soon, however, he got used to the realization that although his domain was quite small, he could at least reign in hell.

In Chiang’s hell, 200,000 people were arrested as political prisoners from 1949 to 1987 and often held in harsh prison conditions for numerous years. Often they had no idea why they were arrested. At least 10,000 were murdered by the KMT. Taiwan went through 38 years of martial law, the second longest stretch in modern history (behind Syria, which was ruled for 48 years under martial law from 1963 to 2011).

We now come to Shih Ju-chen, who puts a human face on all of this due to the extreme measures he took to avoid horrifying torture and execution. Shih was a true patriot who had even been imprisoned for a time due to his anti-Japanese agitation. Initially supportive of the KMT, he grew disillusioned with the ineptitude and corruption. He was shot and injured while protesting during the 228 Incident. Due to his past activism, his current activism and his participation in a leftist, revolutionary study group, he was placed on the most-wanted list by the KMT. Chaing Kai-shek had once said, after all, that he would prefer 1,000 innocent people to be executed than for one leftist to escape execution.

If captured, Shih knew he would be shown no mercy. He would be hideously tortured to reveal information and names and then executed in, perhaps, a barbaric manner (one political prisoner had his feet chopped off so he could not walk to the execution spot with his head held high in defiance).

When he learned that members of his left-wing book club were being captured one after the other, he sought serious and long-lasting ways to go underground. When the KMT learned that his uncle had provided him temporary sanctuary for three days, his uncle was imprisoned for three years. While in hiding, Shih witnessed his wife deliberately raped by police. They then took her to Taipei and forced her into a life of prostitution. He heard about or saw his entire family being persecuted by KMT agents. Shih’s parents were also tortured, his father was later killed in an accident with a train as he was returning from police interrogation, and his younger brother unsuccessfully attempted suicide. KMT agents searched relentlessly for him.

Shih Ju-chang, his younger brother, created an artificial wall inside a fire shed with a .6 meter width for someone to live behind, which included a bucket for waste elimination. Once Shih Ju-chen was enclosed inside the fake wall, a few bricks could be taken down occasionally for food to be passed through. He lived this way for 18 years. In 1970 he died of jaundice because of the time he spent without direct sunlight. It was too dangerous for his brother to contact a doctor to help him. Indeed, it was too dangerous to even provide him with a public burial. He was buried in his younger brother’s backyard on a door panel.

Taiwanese TV director Lin Chih-ju was once asked to do a documentary on Shih. After speaking to the younger brother, Lin seemed to feel that a documentary would be too emotionally painful to make and for others to view. He thus fictionalized the story quite a bit in his 2008 movie, The Wall. The character of Shih became a Japanese political activist in Taiwan who opposed the KMT and who was hidden behind a fake wall for protection.

But the truth remains that a man was so terrified of being captured by the KMT that he lay prostrate for 18 years behind a wall of bricks while his family was tortured and destroyed and while his wife was raped and forced into prostitution. One can only imagine the emotions that he lived with behind that wall, the regret and perhaps shame, perhaps indignation, perhaps resolve. Did he have any choice? Answering this question brings us closer to this man and makes us challenge ourselves to think about the unthinkable for ourselves. It can only increase our compassion and sense of sorrow to think about this man under hopeless circumstances, forced through terror to hide in an unlivable situation.

Shih was put into a position where his only hope for survival and freedom was the political demise of an oppressive regime. He lay and he waited for the corrupt regime to die. Only upon the death of this regime could he live like a real human being with the opportunities for a real human being. But Chiang, with full power, decided to develop the Taiwanese economy. Even though Chiang pulled off what was called an economic miracle in Taiwan, that miracle required generations to lie prostrate in fear while the strongman filled his own pockets and those of his cohorts while the country also seemed to gain. Shih died before the regime did, but the regime did die and his country did, finally, hold its first real elections in 1996. The development of a middle-class through Chiang’s economic development meant the end of the Taiwanese dictatorship.

Positive economic development under a dictatorship is like having a parasite that can induce health in an organism primarily to siphon off as much as it can get from that organism. Shih remaining prostrate for 18 years represented the loss of creative, moral and civic potential that occurs when a dictatorship takes over a country. If you are dangerous to a corrupt regime, you come out and you get tortured and killed. If you never had to go underground it could be argued you worked toward the designs of a corrupt and fraudulent leadership, so you might as well have lain prostrate behind a wall for all the good you were doing.

Every country in the world now, where people are not free, has a figurative Shih Ju-chen lying and hiding behind a wall, waiting.

References and for further reading:

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2019/05/10/2003714865

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2008/03/07/2003404506

History of Taiwan | People, Culture, Maps, & Facts | Britannica

In Taiwan, remembering the deadly crackdown on democracy is only growing more important | CNN

“The Dark Side of Paradise: The Human Cost of Taiwan’s Economic Miracle” by Michael D. Barr

“A Snapshot of the 228 Incident” produced by the Memorial Foundation of 228 in Taipei: 228 Incident｜Memorial Foundation of 228．National 228 Memorial Museum

All photos are provided by the Memorial Foundation of 228  HOME｜Memorial Foundation of 228．National 228 Memorial Museum

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This Post is republished on Medium.

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Photo credit: Author