A soldier holds a Taiwan flag in Taipei on Oct. 6. Taiwan ended almost four decades of martial law in 1987, and the first full elections for its parliament were held in 1992.ANN WANG/Reuters
Taiwanese legislator Fan Yun was stunned to learn two years ago the government had spied on her when she was a university student in the 1990s, even after the self-ruled island had ended martial law and political reforms had been promised.
Until that point, she had thought the Transitional Justice Commission struck in 2018 to investigate Taiwan’s authoritarian past, was for other people: for older activists and dissidents who were killed, beaten up, jailed or had their careers ruined.
But in mid-2020 she found out that what the commission was digging up had a bearing on her as well.
Ms. Fan said the experience is a reminder for her of how recently it was that Taiwan emerged from one-party rule and how young the island’s political freedoms are. “Many people have paid a high price for democracy,” the 54-year-old sociologist and member of the governing Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, said of those persecuted under the “White Terror” repression.
Taiwan ended almost four decades of martial law across most of its territory in 1987, and the first full elections for the Legislative Yuan, its parliament, were held in 1992. The country’s first democratically elected presidential election was in 1996.
Ms. Fan counts 2000 as the final step toward democracy. That’s when Taiwanese voters elected a president, the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian, who for the first time didn’t come from the Kuomintang, the party that had ruled the island since 1949.
She firmly disagrees with former Singapore prime minister Lee Kuan Yew who once said China would collapse if it were a liberal democracy, and she said the experience of martial law has made Taiwanese people even more determined not to live under China’s repressive government. “I totally disagree that there are certain people or certain cultures that just cannot have democracy,” she said.
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China, which conducted provocative military drills around Taiwan in August, still regards the island as a breakaway province, even though the Chinese Communist Party has never ruled the island since taking power on the mainland in 1949. Beijing has reserved the right to use force to annex Taiwan, where Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces fled after they lost a civil war to the Communists.
Documents released as part of the transitional justice inquiry in 2020 revealed a file on Ms. Fan with more than 1,000 pages. The government started keeping tabs on her when she was a student activist in 1990 and a member of the Wild Lily student movement for democracy. This surveillance lasted through 1998 and her studies at Yale University in the United States.
What’s even more horrifying for Ms. Fan is the unearthed documents show other members of the student union leadership were spying for the government. There were “two or three spies within our inner circle,” she said. “It was quite shocking and totally changed my memory of that time.”
It also affects her views of her fellow student-union members. In a further insult, confidentiality rules mean Ms. Fan is still not being told which of her friends was betraying her confidence. “We are still not allowed to learn the identify of those student spies after 30 years,” she said. “The past history still haunts us.”
Taiwan’s undertaking – to exhume the ghosts of its martial-law past through the commission – is distinctly different from the way in which mainland China has shied away from confronting its own recent history, from the catastrophic Great Leap Forward and the ensuing famine that killed tens of millions to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
In its final report, a few months ago, the Transitional Justice Commission recommended the image of Mr. Chiang, the former strongman, be struck from Taiwan’s currency. The commission also exonerated more than 5,800 people convicted of political crimes under martial law and recommended the removal of symbols of Taiwan’s authoritarian past, including statues and monuments.
Ms. Fan said she believes a liberal democracy has taken firm root in Taiwan and that people do not want to live under repression again.
She said the removal of authoritarian symbols will help, but she remains concerned: “Our democracy is still very vulnerable.”
Freddy Lim, another Taiwanese legislator, agrees with Ms. Fan. He’s the lead vocalist for a Taiwanese heavy-metal band, Chthonic, and was first elected to the island’s parliament in 2016. Mr. Lim is an independent but has worked with the DPP.
“I think it’s very fragile, actually,” Mr. Lim, 46, said of Taiwan’s democracy.
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In 2019, Reporters Without Borders released a report saying Taiwan is China’s top target for disinformation campaigns designed to destabilize the island.
Mr. Lim, who was part of the 2014 Sunflower Movement that arose to oppose a trade pact with China, was recently targeted by a voter-recall campaign.
Mr. Lim survived the recall effort in January when the number of votes supporting his ouster fell short of the necessary threshold. The recall initiative was triggered by a Kuomintang politician who alleged Mr. Lim was neglecting his constituents in his Taipei-area district.
The legislator noted the recall effort was supported by China’s state-controlled media. “This is something that China loved to see.” But he acknowledges there is zero evidence that Beijing played a role in the recall effort.
Mr. Lim still supports voter-recall initiatives but said he’d like to see more auditing of the signatures collected to trigger a recall.
In the decades that followed Taiwan’s democratic transition, a distinct identity has developed.
An April, 2022, poll by the independent and non-partisan Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation found 80.1 per cent of respondents identify solely as Taiwanese. Another 10.2 per cent see themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. Only 5.3 per cent view themselves as solely Chinese.