Shih Ming-Teh Escape
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| Shih Ming-Teh (Nory) Leader of people opposition in Taiwan. Look shy, but fierce in action Shy looks but powerful in act The Dark Years In prison Shih met two other detainees whom he recognised from his military training, and lost what little cheer he had left when they told him that the minimum sentence that such prisoners received was two years.’Two years!’ the thought seared his mind. For a young man experiencing the most delicious period of his life, it might as well have been two hundred. When the other two inmates hatched a plan to escape to the nearby mountains where one of them had a relative,Shih was right there in the front row.But the map showing the way to rendezvous house fell into the hands of the guards. Escape attempts breed wrath.Shih was sent with his fellow collaborators and 17 other prisoners to the Taiwan Garrison Command’s Security Centre-the army’s favourite torture house – in the heart of Taipei. Their heads shaved,the prisoners were shackled together at the ankles and squeezed into a small cell.Given the opportunity to bathe only twice a week,the odour that reeked from the cell became positively dreadful. The new interrogators said little,preferring to deal out slugs and kicks. Shih was led to the interrogation room with his hands cuffed behind him.The same questions were put to him again.”What was the Taiwan Independence League all about? growled a scruffy looking questioner. Previous Story of Shih Ming-Teh, Taiwanese Politician against Oppression. Outside Taiyuan was altogether another world. Taiwan’s economy was expanding eapidly,with the GDP showing annual increases of eight to ten per cent.The GNP per capita had bounded from US$50 in a once soporific,agrarian society to USS$ 2,500 in an economy that had become a redoubtable trading juggernaut.With much fanfare,the Republic of China gloated over its economic accomplishment at the expense of those less sophisticated political infidels across the Taiwan Straits. But all was not sunshine and Shaoxing wine for Taiwan, still labouring under martial law. With intellectual and economic attainment, the middle class became more assertive. The benshengren had no special affiliation with China, and that ‘glorious return to the mainland’ had all but become a fatuous fantasy of a dislocated band of Kuomintang soldiers. To the Taiwanese,the island was home and no nationalistic exhortation was going to alter that fact. Meanwhile many of them were becoming restive at being shut out of the governing process. Half a world away, embarrassed by its ally’s authoritian streak, the United States mounted pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to introduce political reforms. In order not to ruffle feathers in Washington — which Taiwan depended on for its defence weaponry |