Tag: Chiang Kai-shek

Why Taiwan’s Election Matters to the World

Media Library

Taiwan’s election on Saturday has big implications not only for the 23 million people who live on the island, but also for China’s superpower rivalry with the United States. Voters chose as their next president Lai Ching-te, the current vice president, who has vowed to continue his party’s policy of protecting the island’s sovereignty. The vote is a rebuke to Beijing’s claim over Taiwan and the growing pressure it has been exerting on the island democracy. As in all major Taiwanese elections, how to deal with China was a central…

Why People Are Flocking to a Symbol of Taiwan’s Authoritarian Past

Chin@Strategy

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Ringed by barbed wire and high gray walls, and once the site of a secretive military detention center, the museum just south of Taipei makes for a surprising tourist hot spot. The Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, housed on the campus of a former military school, is a chilling reminder of the excesses of Taiwan’s not-so-distant authoritarian past when its rulers imposed martial law for four decades. The moldering concrete buildings with fading paint were once the site of secret tribunals where political dissidents were tried and…

Peng Ming-min, Fighter for Democracy in Taiwan, Dies at 98

Chin@Strategy

By that time Mr. Peng had been blacklisted from returning to Taiwan, after a military court in 1964 convicted him of sedition over his involvement with two of his students in the printing of a manifesto calling for the overthrow of the Republic of China government and the establishment of a Taiwanese democracy. American pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to release Mr. Peng had led to his transfer from an eight-year prison sentence to house arrest in 1965. With help from Amnesty International, he escaped in 1970, fleeing to Sweden. The…