Formosa (Kaohsiung) Incident (1979)

Background: The Break with Washington and Formosa Magazine

After the United States ended formal relations with Taiwan in January 1979, Chiang Ching-kuo postponed national representative elections indefinitely, depriving the dangwai (literally, outside the party) opposition of its main avenue. According to the Taiwan Affairs Office of the CCP Shenzhen Municipal Committee, the dangwai journal Formosa was launched in Taipei in September with Huang Hsin-chieh as publisher, Hsu Hsin-liang as president and Chang Chun-hung as editor-in-chief; it set up more than ten offices around the island and sold up to 80,000 copies. The Taiwanese historian Chen Chia-hung notes that much of the frustrated opposition gathered around the magazine, putting it in sharp confrontation with the Kuomintang authorities; Chen gives August as the launch month.

The Clash in Kaohsiung on 10 December

On 30 November 1979 Formosa and the Taiwan Human Rights Committee applied to hold a rally and march in Kaohsiung on International Human Rights Day, 10 December, and were refused; the organisers went ahead. According to the Shenzhen entry, Huang Hsin-chieh, Yao Chia-wen and others spoke that evening, after which several thousand people marched with sticks and torches; police used tear gas and the crowd fought back with sticks, torches and bottles, leaving nearly 200 injured. The entry also says the organisers had prepared “some wooden sticks against possible suppression”. The Central News Agency describes the rally as “forcibly suppressed by soldiers and police, leading to clashes.” An editorial note in the US State Department’s documentary series, citing The New York Times, says “police attempted to block a World Human Rights Day rally in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, prompting 10,000 protesters to attack unarmed security troops.”

Mass Arrests and the Military Trial

From three days later the authorities arrested dangwai figures across Taiwan—152 on “suspicion of sedition”, according to the Shenzhen entry; Shih Ming-teh, the march’s commander, went into hiding before being caught. From 18 March 1980 the Taiwan Garrison Command’s military court at the Jingmei detention centre in Taipei publicly tried eight defendants: Huang Hsin-chieh, Shih Ming-teh, Chang Chun-hung, Yao Chia-wen, Lin Yi-hsiung, Lin Hung-hsuan, Annette Lu and Chen Chu. Chen Chia-hung notes that it was the first political trial under martial law fully reported by domestic and foreign media, and that the prosecution alleged four kinds of sedition: “Taiwan independence”, “violent seizure of power”, “overseas conspiracy” and “links with the Communists”. Shih told the court that the bans on parties and newspapers, martial law and the never-re-elected legislature were the four great harms to Taiwan’s democratisation.

On 18 April the military court sentenced Shih to life imprisonment, Huang to fourteen years and the other six to twelve years each; another 33 were tried in ordinary courts, more than 30 of whom, according to the Shenzhen entry, received four to six years. A memorandum of 30 April 1980 by Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Patricia Derian stated: “The trials, while open, were a sham. Signed confessions were extracted through intimidation and torture.” The authorities, she wrote, had “effectively removed the most potent oppositionists from the political scene”; ten more people, including the leader of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, had been indicted on 29 April for trial by military court.

Rehabilitation and Competing Assessments

In May 2022 Taiwan’s Transitional Justice Commission annulled the convictions of Shih Ming-teh, Lin Yi-hsiung and Fan Cheng-yu, completing the annulment of every Formosa Incident conviction. Its reasons included Chiang Ching-kuo’s personal direction of the response, in violation of the separation of powers and judicial independence; alleged coercion of Shih and torture of Lin without examination of whether their confessions were voluntary; punishment of membership in the magazine and participation in the Human Rights Day rally, infringing freedom of assembly and association; and an expansive reading of Article 100 of the Criminal Code that treated contacts with independence activists, publishing and rallies as sedition.

Assessments differ. The Shenzhen Taiwan Affairs Office describes the incident as “an organised and prepared political contest” between the dangwai and the KMT in which “both sides came prepared” and the KMT turned events to its advantage, leaving the dangwai movement in a trough but the KMT also badly damaged. Chen Chia-hung concludes that the KMT’s public trial of the defendants “not only failed to curb the dangwai’s growth but backfired.” The Central News Agency calls it the incident “that later shaped Taiwan’s democratisation.”