Chiang was Mr. No Democracy - Taiwan

[dArKeR]

The pan-blue camp was on the defensive last week after a research fellow of the Academia Sinica, Wu Nai-teh (吳乃德), during a seminar entitiled Taiwan's Democratic Development in the Twentieth Century, made a vigorous attack on the reputation of Taiwan's last dictator, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).

For far too long it has been an orthodoxy in Taiwan -- the result, like so many orthodoxies here, of the blue camp's need to cover up its fascistic suppression of democratic tendencies and four decades of human-rights abuse -- that Chiang was the instigator of democratic reform.

This is rubbish. Chiang was a former secret policeman with possibly more blood on his hands than more notorious and universally reviled figures such as Ferdinand Marcos. His one aim, after his father was justifiably kicked out of China, was to make sure that Taiwan could survive as a haven for his refugee clique and everything he ever did was calculated to that end, be it the jailing or murdering of Taiwanese democracy activists, the co-opting of those Taiwanese prepared to collaborate with his criminal regime, strengthening Taiwan's economy or lifting martial law.

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2003/09/28/2003069588