Comic Research Notes #1

State-Building and the White Terror: The Cause of Political Persecution in Early 1950s in Taiwan, Ching-Hsuan Su (Master Thesis)

 

Today I learned that the founder of Taiwan's communist party and 

a leading figure in many anti-KMT movement was a women named Xie Xuehong.  

 

The cause of the White Terror is usually interpreted in two ways. 

The first is to place Taiwan in the global context of the Cold War and the Chinese Civil War. This position understands the persecution of left-wing activists and intellectuals as following the direction of the US Empire. The difficulty with this view is that it ignores the agency and semi-autonomy that the KMT possessed under this period. It underplays the fact that in order to secure its rule on the island, the KMT also persecuted pro-US forces that threatened its power. 

A more subtle version of this view is best exemplified by left-wing historian 藍博洲 (Lan Bo-Zhou), who understands the White Terror as a campaign to root out the left-wing organizations on the island who play a leading role in anti-KMT movements. The US is the condition of possibility for KMT's rule in Taiwan, and the rooting out of the left is the necessary process of KMT security. This view, however, is not without problems. It over-inflates the impact exerted by the Taiwanese Communist Party (TCP) and its movements. The TCP was a major anti-KMT actor during the period but not the only one, nor did it take a leading role. In reality, the masses largely neither express solidarity with the communist success in China, nor identify with the left-wing project of its Taiwanese counterpart. 

The second view, in conversation with the first, is advanced by the scholar 李筱峰 (Li Xiao-fung). This view understand the White Terror chiefly as the KMT's effort to ensure the security of its rule. In his article, 台灣戒嚴時期政治案件的類型 (Categories of Political Persecution Cases under Taiwan's Martial Law Era), Li describe 8 types of political persecution cases which include communists and left-wing actors, Taiwan independence activists, indigenous elites, liberal and democracy activists, etc. He provides examples of each category and describes the challenges they present to the KMT rule. 

This view attempts to demonstrate the source of White Terror violence as a stabilizing mechanism internal to the authoritarian state as opposed to the direct influence of anti-communist geopolitical forces and influences. This explanation, however, is unsuccessful in challenging Lan's subtler version of the first view, in which US imperialism and US interest create the ground for KMT's activities. (does it need/want to challenge it? if so, why?) (authoritarian security vs Cold War framework, p17)

 

Drawing from the recent theories of "state-building" and "state-formation", scholar 吳叡人 (Wu Rwei-Ren) subsumes the above two views into the three interconnected and temporally overlapping contexts that condition KMT's chosen path of monopolizing violence and securing its territory –– of state-building.

1. State-building Project from Mainland China, 1945 - early 1950s: difficulty of incorporation of Taiwan in to the larger Chinese Republic after WWII, resulting in (1) the violent suppression of the 228 movement and (2) the persecution of non communist actors in the early 50s.

2. KMT's state-building in Taiwan, 1949 - 1987: difficulty of moving the state apparatus from China to Taiwan after the lost of the Chinese Civil War, resulting in (3) violence enacted to achieve minority rule (what's the difference between (2) and (3)?) and (4) the anti-communist persecution as the extension of the Chinese Civil War. 

3. The Cold War, 1947 - 1989: US interest and support for KMT's Taiwan tacitly permits and provides stability for the KMT to achieve violent process of state-building. (A little unclear on this whole argument.) (State building+three contexts, p12) 

Under these constraints, KMT, as a nascent state weakened by a brutal war, built its state in Taiwan first through a terroristic and easier-to-develop "despotic power" while developing infrastructure of power, under the protection and stability provided by the US,  to penetrate into society and more effectively exert control. As this "infrastructure power" became more developed, the use of despotic power becomes more sparing. (despotic power v. infrastructural power, p14)

 

All of the above interpretations assume the state as a unitary rational actor. This is a useful framework when discussing intentional acts of political persecution, cases such as the elimination of communist and left wing actors, the suppression of independent movement and liberal activists, and the removal of political factions threatening the ruling Chiang family within the KMT. Yet this view proves to be insufficient when discussing a specific class of cases –– miscarriage of justice (冤錯假案), or cases where the intelligence agencies knew a person's innocence*,  but decided to carry out the persecution nonetheless. 

That the cause of these cases are usually attributed to collateral damage or the corrupting influence of absolute power points to the need of clearer theoretical elucidation. 

The author believes that to understand the source of these miscarriage of justice, one must understand state actors not as "one solid piece of steel", but in three agentic levels: 

1. The Chiang family as the face of the KMT, the seemingly unitary agent whose motivation is analyzed above. 

2.  The multiple intelligence agencies whose existence and overlapping area of jurisdiction is the result of clique politics bubbling in post-WWII China, and the difficulty of cramming all of the agencies from the whole of China onto one small island. The two main intelligence agencies of the period are Military Intelligence Bureau (Whampoa clique) and Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (CC clique). The MIB and MJIB, controlled by powerful cliques, exercised semi-autonomy within Chiang's KMT. Yet their overlapping functions and the limited resources of the state created pressures on both agencies to compete, withhold information, out-perform, and even frame members of one another.  (保密局v.調查局, p113)

The miscarriage of justice committed under this level may be further subdivided into (1) inter-cliques struggles, where members of the agencies or their associates are framed and (2) institutional rationality: the offer of prize money or the enforcement of performance requirements, in order to out-compete the rivalling agency, which motivates the false accusation of innocent civilians  (inter-cliques struggle v. institutional rationality p173)

3. The individual agents that may actively seek out people to persecute for the prize money or passively hand in innocent civilians to meet the mandated performance requirement. (institutional rationality and individual agents, p184) 

It is in the interaction of these three levels of rational actors ––  Chiang's power over the continued existence of the cliques, the cliques' struggle for power with each other, the motivation presented to the individual agents –– that the explanation for the widespread miscarriage of justice is to be found. 

* By using the word innocence, I do not wish to convey that the other persecution cases were legitimate or right, that the people persecuted are "guilty". By "innocent" I only mean that they are unrelated to KMT's project of anti-left wing suppression, security of power, and state building.

 

Chapter arrangement:

Chapter 1: Introduction, literature review (p10)

Chapter 2:  Development and elimination of KMT's primary internal enemy Taiwanese Communist Party.  Strategies and missteps in each periods. (p37)

Chapter 3,4: KMT's strategy of countering internal enemies. Chap 2 focuses on 1945 - early 1950s (228 incident), chap 3 focuses on 1949 - 1987 (elimination of internal enemies, two intelligence agencies). Showing the gradual development of infrastructural power. (p78, p100)

Chapter 5:  Imagined threat of internal communism as a driver of state building, fabricating internal enemies and the logic of wrongful and framed cases. (p162)

Chapter 6: Conclusion (p208)

Appendix: Relationship between early communist leader Xie Xuehong and Cai Xiaoqian. (p213)