Arrested in 1950 for joining a communist group during the White Terror, Yen Shih-hung was among the first batch of more than 800 political prisoners sent to Green Island
By Han Cheung / Contributing reporter
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Oct. 12 to Oct. 18 After 11 years in prison on Green Island, Yen Shih-hung (顏世鴻) was finally due for release when a camp guard asked him for NT$20,000 to help pay his bride price. Yen refused. The next day, officials deemed that he had “failed to improve his thinking” and ordered him to undergo further political reeducation on Siaoliouciou (小琉球), where prisoners were also subjected to forced labor. He spent another 19 months there before regaining his freedom in January 1964.
Physician and author Yen Shih-hung was imprisoned for 13 years during the White Terror.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Cultural Memory Bank
Yen’s punishment stemmed from his joining the Taiwan Provincial Student Affairs Committee (台灣省學生工作委員會), a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) organization, in January 1950. Before he participated in any activities, the government launched a crackdown on Taiwan’s communist underground. Of the more than 30 people implicated in Yen’s case, 11 were executed that November — including Yeh Sheng-chi (葉盛吉), who had recruited Yen. Between his arrest in June 1950 and his release, Yen spent time in the major military detention centers in the Taipei area during the White Terror: the north and south stations of the Secrets Bureau, and the Military Law Bureau’s facilities on Qingdao E Road and in Ankeng, Sindian District (新店). The Jingmei Military Detention Center, now the Jingmei White Terror Memorial Park, did not open until 1968.
In 2012, the physician and author published his memoir, No. 3, Qingdao East Road: My Hundred-Year Memories and Taiwan’s Outrageous Era (青島東路三號:我的百年之憶及台灣的荒謬年代), recounting his life and reflecting on his experiences.
The cover of Yen Shih-hung’s 2012 memoir, No. 3, Qingdao East Road: My Hundred-Year Memories and Taiwan’s Outrageous Era.
Photo: CNA
ANTI-JAPANESE FAMILYYen was born on Oct. 13, 1927 in Kaohsiung to a family with a history of resisting Japanese rule. His grandfather fought in the Republic of Formosa resistance before it fell in 1895, and several of his maternal uncles were involved in anti-Japanese activities while living in China. His fifth uncle, Chang Hsi-chun (張錫鈞), was a noted intelligence agent during the Second Sino-Japanese War. His father trained as an ophthalmologist and moved the family to Quanzhou, Fujian Province, around 1930 to practice there. Involved in Taiwanese anti-colonial resistance in China, he strictly forbade speaking Japanese at home, Yen recalls.
An article in the Nov 30, 1950 Central Daily Times detailing the executions of 11 people involved in the Student Affairs Committee Case.
Photo courtesy of National Central Library
The family returned to Taiwan in 1937 for reasons that are unclear. His father was detained for 11 days soon after, and again for two months in 1938. The family fell on hard times as his father could not practice openly in Taiwan and suffered from poor health after going on hunger strike during his imprisonment. Yen was accepted into Taihoku Imperial University’s medical school in March 1945. But amid concerns that US troops would invade Taiwan, the students were sent to Tamsui to build fortifications and learn how to fight. He contracted malaria while visiting his family in Tainan and spent the rest of the war in isolation. COMMUNIST UNDERGROUND
This building in Siaoliouciou once hosted a labor reform camp. Yen Shih-hung was sent here for further political reeducation after completing his sentence in Green Island.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Yen was moved to tears of joy when Japan announced its surrender. He returned home to find his family living in a metal-roofed shack, all of them recovering from malaria. His father was more interested in politics than practicing medicine, Yen recalled, and the family was so poor that, after resuming medical school in Taipei, he survived by selling his blood until he earned a scholarship in 1949. By this time, Yen had become disillusioned with KMT rule and was reading voraciously, including leftist literature. He met Yeh in 1947, and the two worked together in the student self-government association and lived in the same dorm. Yeh had joined the Chinese Communist Party’s Taiwan Working Committee in 1948 and was allegedly in charge of its student branch at National Taiwan University (NTU). He revealed his role to Yen in 1949, and on Jan. 23, 1950, Yen officially joined. Just six days later, Working Committee leader Tsai Hsiao-chien (蔡孝乾) was arrested, and Yen’s first order was to lay low and refrain from all activities.
A 1958 aerial photo of the Military Law Bureau’s detention center on Taipei’s Qingdao E Road.
Photo courtesy of Center for GIS, RCHSS, Academia Sinica
Tsai escaped and was re-arrested in April, after which he “repented” and provided authorities with information about Taiwan’s communist network. Mass arrests began in May, including several NTU medical department heads and physicians. Yeh was caught on May 29. Yen spent the next few weeks on edge, lingering on campus as he waited for final exams. Many of his friends had already been detained. On June 21, police showed up at his door. IMPRISONMENT AND RELEASEYen was first detained by the Criminal Police Corps and sent to the south station of the Military Law Bureau, which was so crowded that prisoners had to take turns sleeping. He was then moved to the north station, where he was questioned and confessed to joining the committee. He arrived at 3, Qingdao E Road (青島東路三號) on Sept. 2, where he underwent a military trial without a lawyer. He recalled prisoners being interrogated for days, many of whom received death sentences or lengthy prison terms. In the morning, guards would call people’s names, and those inmates would be taken to Machangding (馬場町) in today’s Wanhua District (萬華) to be executed. Yen wrote his farewell letter, but he was spared capital punishment and received 12 years. He said that he clearly remembered the morning of Nov. 29, when Yeh and 10 other prisoners in his case were called out. On May 13, 1951, the prisoners were handcuffed together and marched in rows from Qingdao E Road to the now-defunct Huashan Railway Station, where they boarded a train to Keelung before taking a boat to Green Island. Unable to return to NTU after his release, Yen continued his studies at Taipei Medical University and began practicing at a charitable hospital in Tainan that treated poor and chronically ill patients. On Oct. 23, 1971, he visited Machangding alone during a business trip to Taipei. It was chilly and drizzling, just like the morning when Yeh and the others were executed. He stood there for 20 minutes. The next day was Frost Descent, one of the 24 solar terms, which would become the title of the first version of his memoir, published in 1988.“I believe no one has the right to decide whether another person lives or dies, so I wrote this long, childish piece for your deaths,” he wrote. Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that either have anniversaries this week or are tied to current events.