It’s fitting that just as demonstrations for democracy in Hong Kong reached critical mass in the news, Su Beng, godfather of the independence movement in Taiwan, died last month in Taipei. He was 100 years old.
Taiwan — its official name is the Republic of China — was established as a China-in-exile when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists were defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communists in 1949, and is nowhere nearer independence today than when Su Beng began agitating for it 70 years ago. Indeed, in the week that Su died, two more governments, the South Pacific republics of Kiribati and the Solomon Islands, severed diplomatic relations with Taipei under pressure from the People’s Republic of China.
The United States, which does not recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, moved its Chinese Embassy to Beijing during the Carter administration. Taiwan-U.S. relations, which remain extensive, are conducted through a private, nonprofit entity called the American Institute in Taiwan.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Cold War dream of reclaiming the mainland has long since devolved into a twilight impasse. The Taiwanese also face internal obstacles, such as division among advocates of outright independence like Su Beng, proponents of closer ties or even union with the People’s Republic, and a silent majority that values Taiwan’s thriving free-market economy, fully functioning democracy, and “independence” in all but name.
Still, the crisis in Hong Kong is an urgent reminder that an ambiguous political status can be lethal when dealing with General Secretary Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party. Which makes the life and work of Su Beng especially pertinent.
Born Lin Chao-hui in Taipei when Taiwan was a backwater under Japanese colonial rule, he studied economics and political science at Tokyo’s Waseda University before migrating to mainland China in 1942, where he joined Mao’s resistance to Japanese occupation and, after 1945, to Chiang’s authoritarian government.
Yet the triumph of Mao’s Communists, and Chiang’s retreat to Taiwan, changed Su’s life. Never a member of the party, he was horrified by the mass executions in the new People’s Republic. “Why would you need to kill so many people to move things forward?” he told an interviewer earlier this year. Fleeing to Taipei, he was equally appalled by the brutal imposition of martial law on the Taiwanese by Chiang and his exiled Chinese Nationalists.
Lin Chao-hui now began the transition to the revolutionary Su Beng — the pseudonym means “to know history clearly” in a Taiwanese dialect — and conspired to assassinate Chiang. The plot was uncovered and, in 1952, Su fled to Japan where he was granted political asylum, founded the Taiwan Independence Association, and opened a popular restaurant which, for the next four decades, was headquarters for Taiwanese nationalists opposed to Chiang and his rule by mainland exiles.
Su’s revolutionary career was comparatively lackluster. He and his fellow insurgents trained in guerrilla warfare, and sporadic bombing attacks were carried out on Taiwan; there was even an attempt on the life of Chiang’s son and eventual successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, at New York’s Plaza Hotel. But the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975 prompted Su to trade violence for political reform and, in 1987, Chiang Ching-kuo ended the long rule of martial law. Five years later, Taiwan held its first democratic legislative elections and, in 1993, Su returned to Taiwan.
His principal achievement, in any case, had not been political so much as scholarly. Su’s success as an exiled entrepreneur enabled him to research and write a three-volume masterwork, Taiwan’s 400-Year History (1962), first published in a Japanese edition and later translated into Chinese. It helped transform his homeland’s sense of identity not as a renegade province or imperial outpost but indigenous mixture of Chinese and Austronesian influences, abetted by centuries of colonial dominance. This, in turn, had yielded a hybrid Taiwanese culture, independent and distinctive.
Its influence on the politics of free Taiwan has been profound. And while not a duplicate of its cousin Hong Kong, there is a family resemblance.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
