6 days ago
- Politics
- AU Financial Review
The terrible secrets of Taiwan's Stasi files
During the 1980s, a young intellectual called Yang Bi-chuan used to give illicit history lectures in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan. Charismatic and fearless, with a frizz of unruly hair, Yang was only in his 30s, but had already served seven years in prison for angering the authoritarian government that ruled the island. A voracious reader and self-taught historian, he referred to himself as the Taiwanese Trotsky.
At that time, nobody was teaching the Taiwanese their own history. The lush, subtropical island, which sits 130 kilometres off the coast of China, was run by the exiled Chinese Nationalist Party, the Kuomintang (KMT). When Taiwan was mentioned in KMT-run schools and universities, it was merely as a footnote in the glorious 5000-year-long history of China. Students at the National Taiwan University invited Yang to come to their classrooms after the day's official lessons were over to fill in the gaps.
