Taiwan’s brutal White Terror period revisited on Green Island: confronting demons inside a former prison
- Thousands of political prisoners were incarcerated in a notorious prison under Chiang Kai-shek’s rule
- The Human Rights Art Festival at the former penitentiary is helping Taiwan reconcile its past
Green Island is a 15 sq km islet bursting from the sea off the coast of Taitung, a small city on Taiwan’s wild southeast coast. Long the domain of the Amis aboriginal people, the island saw the Han Chinese arrive in the early 1800s, and brand the volcanic outcropping “Fire-Burned Island”, in reference to the fires islanders would light to guide fishing boats to shore, long before the lighthouse was built, in 1939.
Most of the 3,000 or so permanent residents live near Nanliao Fishing Harbour, which attracts legions of visitors every year, mostly thanks to the coral reefs that encircle the island. Yet what the local tourist bureau dubs a “snorkellers’ paradise” is overshadowed by the darkest expression of totalitarian rule in Taiwan, namely the “White Terror”: decades of disappearances, imprisonments and executions under Chiang Kai-shek’s martial law.
Three hundred kilometres away, in the capital Taipei, Chiang’s statue stands tall inside his eponymous memorial hall, which remains a place of pilgrimage and veneration. But during his presidential tenure, the generalissimo ruthlessly targeted supposed communist sympathisers, critics of the regime and just about anyone who dared imagine that Taiwan might be the subject of its own story.
Of the 140,000 White Terror victims, 20,000 would be incarcerated in two notorious Green Island prisons, the New Life Correction Centre (1951-1965) and later, the Reform and Re-education Prison (1972-1987).
The brutality carried out on this little rock would foreshadow Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution across the strait, but would be largely overlooked by the United States and its cold war allies, who saw the spectre of communism as a far greater concern.
Many Taiwanese date the beginning of the White Terror to a quashed rebellion on February 28, 1947, known as the 228 Incident. But it was in the 1950s and 60s, after 1.5 million mainlanders poured onto the island following Mao’s Communist Party takeover of China, that Chiang’s ruthless campaign for his ruling Kuomintang (KMT) to curb criticism and silence dissent accelerated. The terror would only end when Chiang’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted the longest imposition of martial law in the world at the time, in 1987.