Taiwan's White Terror

30-second overview: From 1949 to 1987 — 38 years and 56 days — Taiwan saw at least 29,407 military trials, more than 20,000 confirmed victims, and estimates of 140,000 to 200,000 affected. But what sustained this system for 38 years was not the secret police — there were only a few thousand of them. It was the "joint guarantee" system under which every person in Taiwan had to find a neighbor to vouch for them in order to hold a job, enroll in school, or get married. The uncle who ran the grocery store downstairs was your surveillance camera.

On the morning of May 28, 1963, at Machangding in Taipei, 46-year-old Chen Chih-hsiung was dragged from his cell and marched to the execution ground. The Taiwan Garrison Command guards knew he would shout slogans at the top of his lungs, so they first used an axe to sever the soles of his feet so he could not stand, then stuffed a rag into his mouth and pierced his cheeks with wire.¹

But in that moment before the shots rang out, he still shouted in Japanese: "Long live the Taiwanese people! Long live Taiwan independence!"

Chen Chih-hsiung was a graduate of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Dutch-language program), a former official in Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and after the war returned to Taiwan to devote himself to the independence movement. In 1961 he organized the "Tongxin Society," and two years later became the first Taiwanese person executed for "advocating Taiwan independence" during the 38-year martial law period. Sixty years after his death, a small group still holds a memorial for him every May 28. Most Taiwanese people have never heard that name.

This article is about the machine that sent Chen Chih-hsiung to Machangding, that put Shih Shui-huan on a list of colleagues at the Taipei Post and Telecommunications Bureau, that lured Uyongu Yatauyungana (Kao I-sheng) down from Alishan, and that put Bo Yang in prison for nine years over a single comic strip — the White Terror was not carried out by any one person; it was sustained by a system that turned two million families across the island into a mutual surveillance network.

From 29,407 to 140,000 — Why the Numbers Never Add Up

In November 1988, one year and four months after the lifting of martial law, Chief Prosecutor Chen Shou-huang of the Ministry of Justice reported a figure to the Legislative Yuan: over the 38 years of martial law, military courts had adjudicated a total of 29,407 criminal cases involving non-active-duty military personnel.²

This was the first official figure ever released. But every researcher knew it was only the tip of the iceberg.

The Transitional Justice Commission's "Taiwan Transitional Justice Database," launched in 2020, contains records of 14,406 individuals subjected to political prosecution.³ The Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation has tallied 1,061 death-row inmates during the martial law period (as of 2013).⁴ The Executive Yuan separately estimated in 2017 that the actual number of victims may exceed 200,000.⁵

These numbers will never add up. The reason is not differing statistical methods — it is that they are fundamentally impossible to count: how many people died while fleeing, how many were secretly executed, how many were killed while resisting arrest — none of these appear in the archives. Tsai Kuan-yu of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation has stated that mainlander victims accounted for 46% of the total.⁵ This figure overturns the common impression that "White Terror equals the KMT persecuting native Taiwanese." Once that machine was set in motion, anyone could be caught in its gears.

⚠️ Contested perspective
The number of White Terror victims remains a political question to this day, not a statistical one. Conservatives tend to cite the Ministry of Justice's 29,407, emphasizing that most cases are documented; independence-leaning voices tend to cite 140,000 to 200,000, emphasizing the unknowable scale of underground suffering. Both figures are partially true, because "truth" in that era was itself a systematically concealed commodity.

Joint Guarantees — Who Sustained 38 Years of Martial Law

In the year Chen Chih-hsiung was executed, Taiwan's population was approximately 12 million. How many were secret police? Based on various historical sources, the combined personnel of the Taiwan Garrison Command, the Security Command, the Investigation Bureau, the China Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps, and other intelligence and security agencies numbered only a few thousand.

So what sustained it for 38 years?

Every Taiwanese person who wanted to hold a job, enroll in school, or get married had to find two people willing to guarantee them.

This system was codified in the Regulations for the Suppression of Communist Spies During the Period of Communist Rebellion promulgated in 1950, known as the "joint guarantee and collective responsibility system."⁴ For a prisoner to be released, two guarantors had to fill out multiple guarantee forms: children could not guarantee parents, guarantors had to possess a certain level of property, and in addition to personal guarantees, a merchant guarantee was also required. The forms were sent to the local police station for verification, then to the Police Administration Bureau, then to the Ministry of National Defense's Military Law Bureau, and finally the prison issued the release certificate. If the guaranteed person "re-offended," the guarantors would be held collectively responsible.

This mechanism applied not only to prison releases. Civil service appointments, school enrollment, overseas travel applications, marriage registration — every routine action required a "certificate of清白 (clean record)," and a clean record required someone to vouch for you.

📝 Curator's note
On Taiwanese household registration booklets from the 1950s through the 1980s, many people's entries bear a red stamp beside them: guarantor's name, address, and national ID number. If you open an old household registration booklet today, you can see how kinship and neighborly relations of that era were recorded as political obligations. Your neighbor remembers you because he guaranteed you; your uncle stopped speaking to your father for a period because he refused to guarantee him. Those silences, ruptures, and tangled family dynamics — many of them began with a single guarantee form.

Eyes Beyond the Secret Police

Beyond the joint guarantee system, there was an informant network. In 1983, there were more than 5,000 informants on university campuses across Taiwan.⁶ From 1980 to 2000, the number of citizens monitored by the KMT government each year ranged between 7,000 and 15,000.⁶

In the reports these informants wrote, some recorded dissidents' sexual orientations, extramarital affairs, and secret vices. Some files discussed exploiting "women's psychological weaknesses" to target radical actors.⁶ Information could be fabricated, exaggerated, or used as a tool in power struggles, but once it entered a file, it became true.

✦ "There are secret police at the door watching me — I have to escape." — Chen Meng-ho, White Terror survivor, speaking to a visitor while seriously ill in a hospital in his later years (from The Reporter's Searching for the Politically Wounded)

Chen Meng-ho was a political prisoner who spent more than a decade behind bars. After his release he became a photographer, leaving images for other survivors. But sixty years later, lying in a hospital bed, he still believed there were secret police at the door.⁷ You cannot say he remembered wrong. The greatest achievement of the White Terror was making people remember for the rest of their lives.

Three Reasons for Arrest: Thought, Connection, Luck

The most terrifying thing about the White Terror was not that it had clear standards — it was that it had none.

Thought: Bo Yang's Comic Strip (1968)

On January 3, 1968, the family section of the China Daily News published a Popeye comic strip translated by translator Bo Yang.⁸ The story was about Popeye and his son buying a small island together, establishing a private country on it, and each running for president. In Bo Yang's translation, the child says to Popeye: "There are only two people in the whole country, you know!"

The military tribunal concluded that this was a veiled reference to Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo. On March 7, Bo Yang was arrested, and the military court sentenced him to 12 years. In 1975, following Chiang Kai-shek's death, his sentence was commuted to 8 years. On the day his sentence was completed in March 1976, he was instead transferred by the National Security Bureau to Green Island as a "supervised employee" and continued to be detained. It was not until April 1977, after the U.S. government intervened, that he was released.⁸

A total of 9 years and 26 days. For translating an American comic strip.

💡 Did you know?
During his nine years on Green Island, Bo Yang read the Zizhi Tongjian intensively and completed manuscripts for three works: A History of the Chinese People, Genealogies of Chinese Emperors, Empresses, Princes, and Princesses Across the Dynasties, and A Chronological Table of Chinese History. After his release, he spent another ten years translating the 72-volume Bo Yang Edition of the Zizhi Tongjian. That cell turned him from a translator into a historian.

Connection: Shih Shui-huan's Ceiling (1954)

Shih Shui-huan was born in 1926 in Tainan, graduated from Tainan Girls' Vocational School, and took a job as a clerk at the Taipei Post and Telecommunications Bureau. In 1954 she was 28 years old.

Her younger brother Shih Chih-cheng was a National Taiwan University student who, after becoming involved in the "NTU Branch Case," went into hiding — concealed in the ceiling of her Taipei dormitory for two years. On July 19, 1954, Shih Shui-huan was arrested for protecting her brother, along with colleagues Chien Ching-chih and Ting Yao-tou, who were implicated in the "Post and Telecommunications Branch Case."⁹ Two years later, on July 24, 1956, she was executed in Taipei at the age of 30. Her brother Shih Chih-cheng's ultimate fate remains unknown.

During her two years in prison, she wrote 69 letters home to her mother.¹⁰

✦ "Dear Mom, tonight I don't know why, my heart is so heavy I can barely breathe, and tears keep welling up in my eyes. But I grit my teeth and hold back with all my might, because I know I shouldn't cry for Mom anymore — it would only make Mom sadder..." — from a prison letter by Shih Shui-huan (from the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation's Shih Shui-huan's Letters Home)

In her final letter, she wrote: "Every morning, as Mom instructed, I read the Bible and pray. May God's grace descend upon our entire family. Amen!"¹⁰

The charge for which she was executed was "communicating with bandits" (i.e., communists). In reality, her crime was having a brother on the run.

Luck: The 896 Villagers of Luku (1952)

On December 28–29, 1952, the Ministry of National Defense mobilized several thousand military police to surround the Luku mountain area in Shihding Township, Taipei County (present-day Guangming Village, Shihding District, New Taipei City), in a massive sweep targeting the so-called "Taiwan People's Armed Self-Defense Corps." The underground organization led by commander Chen Pen-jiang and branch secretary Chen Chun-ching did exist at the time, but most of the villagers they recruited had no idea what they had joined; some had simply given food to a group of fugitives.¹¹

896 people were arrested. 135 were sentenced, 41 to death.¹¹ Compensation payments ultimately totaled NT$545.63 million, and the Control Yuan issued a corrective ruling against the Ministry of National Defense.¹¹ This was the largest single political case of the White Terror period.

The late former Academia Historica director Chang Yen-hsien visited Luku during his lifetime and conducted oral histories with more than 100 villagers.¹¹ The common trait among the villagers: they were never able to give a complete account of "what actually happened that year." Not because they had forgotten, but because they had never truly known. Some did not learn until years after their release what organization they had "joined" back then.

📝 Curator's note
Director Wu Nien-jen's films A City of Sadness and Dust in the Wind draw partly on stories from Luku. The site is now called the "Luku Incident Memorial Park," with a monument inside. In 2017, the son of ringleader Chen Pen-jiang said at the memorial ceremony: "On behalf of my father, I apologize to everyone." An apology from a perpetrator's descendant is extremely rare in White Terror memorial rituals.

Green Island's Beds and Kao I-sheng's Letters

In 1951, most political prisoners across Taiwan were sent to the "Rehabilitation Center" on Green Island for thought reform.¹² This institution operated until 1965, at its peak holding 2,000 people, organized into 3 brigades and 12 squadrons, with 120 to 160 people per squadron.¹²

The "new lives" (prisoners were uniformly called "new lives") attended three hours of thought reform classes daily: the Father of the Nation's Testament, the Leader's Words and Deeds, the Three Principles of the People, Communist Atrocities, and Critiques of Communism. The rest of the time was spent in labor: building houses, repairing roads, growing vegetables.

Survivor Chang Tse-chou later returned to the reconstructed barracks: "There weren't enough bunks, so many people had to sleep on the floor — I was often woken up by people stepping on me!"¹²

Between 1953 and 1956, the Rehabilitation Center also saw a "re-rebellion case": people already serving sentences on Green Island were accused of continuing to organize and conspire within the prison, were tried again, and received additional, heavier sentences.¹² Some people consequently spent more than a decade longer on Green Island.

Kao I-sheng's 60 Letters

Kao I-sheng (Tsou name: Uyongu Yatauyungana, 1908–1954) was a Tsou leader from Alishan, a musician, an educator, and the first popularly elected mayor of Wu Feng Township (present-day Alishan Township). On September 10, 1952, he was lured down from Alishan under the pretext of a "Mountain Security Conference" and imprisoned in the military detention center at No. 3 Qingdao East Road, Taipei.¹³

During his two years in prison, he wrote 60 letters home in Japanese to Alishan.¹³ On April 17, 1954, he and five others were executed in Taipei. The charge was "bandit spy assembly and rebellion."

The content of those letters was mostly mundane: plant the rice well, take care of the children, trust in God. In a letter written six months before his execution, he wrote: "If I can return home safely, I will continue to work for our people."

On Human Rights Day in 2013, Kao I-sheng's son Kao Ying-chieh donated the 60 letters to the National Human Rights Museum. In 2020, the Ministry of Culture officially published Kao I-sheng's Prison Letters — the first published work of Indigenous transitional justice in Taiwan.¹⁴ Half a century later, the Tsou people could finally read the complete final words of their chief.

📝 Curator's note
At the donation ceremony, Kao I-sheng's son Kao Ying-chieh said he had been reading those letters for decades and only now felt he truly understood them — because his father wrote in Japanese, and Kao Ying-chieh's generation had been raised under a KMT government that forbade speaking Japanese. The White Terror did not merely kill a Tsou chief; it severed the common language between two generations. A father's words that his son could not read — that is among the deepest forms of violence the White Terror inflicted.

Why This History Is Not Over Yet

It is easy to say "the White Terror is over." Martial law was lifted in 1987, the Punishment of Rebellion Act was abolished in 1991, the Compensation Foundation was established in 1995, and the Transitional Justice Commission began operations in 2018. The state apparatus has not killed anyone in 38 years.

But open the family history of any Taiwanese person born between the 1950s and 1980s, flip to the pages about their parents, and the phrase "guarantee" (作保) often appears — followed by a pause. His uncle refused to guarantee, his neighbor once guaranteed, his grandfather nearly lost his job for lack of a guarantor. That pause is where the White Terror has not yet ended.

Chen Chih-hsiung was shot at Machangding in 1963. Kao I-sheng was shot in Taipei in 1954. Shih Shui-huan was shot in Taipei in 1956. Their families spent half a century before they dared to speak these names publicly. Taiwan's transitional justice efforts have overturned 5,983 guilty verdicts,³ established memorial parks, and erected monuments.

But the descendants of those 5,000 university campus informants still live, work, and vote in Taiwan. What their fathers or grandfathers did has never been subject to a lustration law requiring them to come clean.⁶ The so-called "past" has never been publicly reconciled.

This is not about hatred — it is about the ledger. The day the White Terror truly ends will not be the day martial law was lifted, nor the day the Transitional Justice Commission was dissolved. It will be the day Taiwanese society is willing to acknowledge: the system that turned two million families into a mutual surveillance network has left its marks on our unease toward our neighbors, toward strangers, and toward the very words "to guarantee."

Further reading:

• Taiwan's Democratic Transition — The full picture of the forty-year transformation from martial law to one of Asia's freest democracies
• The Martial Law Period — The legal container of 38 years and 56 days and the process of lifting martial law
• Taiwan's Transitional Justice — Post–martial law truth investigations and the unfinished business of holding perpetrators accountable
• The February 28 Incident — The prelude to the White Terror: how the 1947 crackdown foreshadowed the martial law regime
• The Kaohsiung Incident — A pivotal turning point in the late White Terror period, 1979
• Alishan: The Empire's Forest and Kao I-sheng's Mountain — Kao I-sheng's mountain and the story of a silenced Indigenous people
• Yin Hai-kuang — The National Taiwan University philosophy professor placed under house arrest on Wenzhou Street's Lane 18 after the Lei Chen case in 1960, a founding figure of Taiwanese liberalism

References