Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong campaigner for democracy in Taiwan who spent over 20 years in jail for his trigger and later began a protest motion towards a president from his former occasion, died on Jan. 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital.
The trigger was issues of an operation to take away a liver tumor, mentioned his spouse, Chia-chiun Chen Shih.
Mr. Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally damaged up by the police and that’s now seen as a turning level in Taiwan’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy. When he stood trial over the confrontation, he smiled defiantly to the cameras, though his unique tooth had been shattered years earlier than below police torture, and delivered a groundbreaking argument for Taiwan’s independence from China, an thought banned below the rule of Chiang Kai-shek after which his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.
“I used to be imprisoned for 25 years, and I confronted the opportunity of the dying penalty twice, however every time I got here out, I immediately plunged again into the entire effort to overthrow the Chiang household dictatorship,” Mr. Shih mentioned in an interview with The New York Occasions in 2022. “I’m somebody who by no means had a youth.”
He started a lifetime of protest whereas he was a young person. He was first charged with unlawful political actions at age 21. His two spells in jail — together with, he calculated, 13 years in solitary confinement — appeared solely to harden his defiance.
He was honored as a hero when Taiwan emerged as a democracy within the Nineteen Nineties and have become a pacesetter within the Democratic Progressive Occasion, the island’s first main opposition occasion of the brand new period. However in 2006, he led mass protests towards Chen Shui-bian, the Democratic Progressive president of Taiwan, whom Mr. Shih had as soon as endorsed.
Mr. Shih died two days after Taiwan held its eighth direct democratic vote for a president. After his dying, many Taiwanese, together with some who had fallen out with him, praised his function in Taiwan’s democratization. Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, who earlier had her personal strains with him, visited him within the hospital the day earlier than he died.
Mr. Shih “devoted himself to the democratic motion in authoritarian instances, and was a pioneer for Taiwanese democracy and human rights, with a far-reaching affect,” Ms. Tsai wrote in a tribute to Mr. Shih.
Shi Ming-teh was born on Jan. 15, 1941 in Kaohsiung, a port metropolis in southern Taiwan. He was the fourth of six kids of Shih Kuo-tsui, a physician, and Shih Chen Ying, who oversaw the house. The household was effectively off, however Mr. Shih’s childhood was overshadowed by warfare and repression, and Mr. Shih mentioned these reminiscences had formed him all through his life.
Taiwan turned caught within the warfare between Japan, who had occupied the island as a colony for over half a century, and advancing U.S. forces. Mr. Shih recalled U.S. bombers putting Kaohsiung. After Japan’s defeat, Chinese language Nationalist troops took management of Taiwan and ruthlessly eradicated opposition. Mr. Shih recalled watching Nationalist troops gun down college students at Kaohsiung’s prepare station.
He later mentioned his early years had set him on his path as a insurgent towards the waves of colonialists who had dominated Taiwan for hundreds of years; he counted the Nationalists fleeing from China, defeated by Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949, as the most recent of their ranks.
“Taiwan isn’t part of China,” Mr. Shih wrote in a ebook printed in 2021. “Quite the opposite, China is nothing multiple a part of Taiwan’s historical past.”
By the point Mr. Shih was in highschool, the Nationalists had constructed Taiwan right into a fortress towards Mao’s China, and he and a few classmates shaped an amateurish secret society devoted to profitable independence for Taiwan. He signed up for a army academy, telling his mom that he had accomplished so solely to learn to mount an armed revolt towards the Nationalists.
Ms. Shih was an officer on Little Kinmen — a Nationalist-held island perilously near the Chinese language coast — when cops got here to arrest him in 1962. Investigators had uncovered his function within the independence society, and so they appeared satisfied that the group was a part of a a lot bigger plot. They beat Mr. Shih for proof, and his tooth had been shattered or later pulled out.
Mr. Shih was shocked when the choose sentenced him to life imprisonment on a cost of sedition, he mentioned, and never the dying sentence he had anticipated. When he was given an early launch, in 1977, he threw himself again into opposition actions, regardless of the dangers of being present in violation of parole circumstances and being despatched again to jail.
“I may see that he was working like a person on fireplace to problem the authoritarian rule,” Linda Gail Arrigo, an American scholar and pro-democracy campaigner in Taiwan, who was married to Mr. Shih from 1978 to 1995, mentioned in a latest interview with the Formosa Information podcast. “He anticipated to die in jail — by execution.”
By the late Seventies, the Nationalists’ grip on Taiwanese society had began to loosen, and opposition teams started spreading. Mr. Shih and different activists based {a magazine}, “Formosa,” as a automobile for his or her trigger. It arrange workplaces throughout Taiwan, recruited supporters and held conferences.
The US’ determination to modify diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 galvanized the opposition, and Taiwan’s Nationalist authorities clamped down, resulting in the conflict in Kaohsiung in December of that 12 months during which tons of of cops broke up the march organized by Mr. Shih and others.
Lots of his colleagues had been rapidly arrested, however Mr. Shih eluded the police for practically a month earlier than being captured and tried with seven others. An arrest photograph confirmed his jaw coated in bandages, the results of a hasty try at cosmetic surgery to change his look.
The trial drew but extra consideration to their requires democracy, particularly as a result of the federal government — wanting to show its case to the Taiwanese public and the broader world — let journalists and worldwide observers into the courtroom. Tall and lean, Mr. Shih smiled for the cameras, his palms tucked in his pockets, in what he mentioned was an effort to convey insouciant confidence.
He used the trial to assault the Nationalist authorities’s place that Taiwan was a part of China. As a substitute, he argued, Taiwan had been separated from China for many years and had in impact develop into impartial, even when Taiwan’s rulers wouldn’t settle for that actuality. That argument would enter the island’s political mainstream.
“These days these claims appear nothing out of the extraordinary, however on the time they had been a breakthrough,” Mr. Shih wrote in an account of the trial printed in 2021. “My smile and my political counterattack had been the rationale that the tyrants didn’t dare to execute me.”
Sentenced to a different life sentence for sedition, he continued his defiance from jail, even because the society outdoors started to open up. He held starvation strikes to protest the assassination of opposition figures and their relations and was force-fed some 3,000 instances, from 1985 to 1990, his former longtime assistant Huang Hui-chun mentioned in an interview.
In 1987, Taiwan’s president, Lee Teng-hui, provided to launch the so-called Kaohsiung Incident prisoners, however Mr. Shih refused. He would stroll out of jail, he mentioned, provided that he was totally exonerated. That step got here in 1990, and Mr. Shih re-entered a Taiwanese society in ferment.
His lengthy struggle for democracy gave him broad affect, and he turned a lawmaker and chairman of the Democratic Progressive Occasion, which emerged because the central opposition to the Nationalists. However after a long time of imprisonment, Mr. Shih was not all the time at dwelling in Taiwan’s new politics.
When Chen Shui-bian, the Democratic Progressive Occasion’s candidate, gained Taiwan’s presidential election in 2000, many supporters of self-rule for Taiwan had been elated by his shock victory. However Mr. Shih was extra guarded. He resigned from the occasion to emphasise his political independence and later turned towards Mr. Chen, angered by rising allegations of corruption.
In 2006, Mr. Shih organized the “Purple Shirt” motion that drew tons of of 1000’s of individuals to protests outdoors the presidential palace in Taipei calling for Mr. Chen’s removing from workplace. (Mr. Chen stepped down in 2008 and was later convicted on corruption costs. He was launched from jail in 2015 on medical parole.)
Mr. Shih appeared to revel being again in a political battle, and he blended with the crowds, generally sporting a shirt that proclaimed him to be a “commander in chief” of the motion.
“If I look younger, it’s as a result of I used to be frozen for 25 years,” he advised The New York Occasions on the time, referring to his years in jail.
However his renewed prominence alienated some mates who had been aligned with the Democratic Progressive Occasion and sad that he had labored with Nationalist Occasion politicians. Mr. Shih argued that he had been making an attempt to guard democracy and that effort had been extra necessary than partisan ties.
He married Chia-chiun Chen Shih, his second spouse, in 1996. He’s additionally survived by their two daughters, Mino Shih and Jasmine Shih. Mr. Shih additionally had two daughters from an earlier relationship.
In his later years, Mr. Shih promoted proposals for locating widespread floor between China and Taiwan, concepts that a few of his former mates noticed as naïve. He printed three volumes that recounted his trials and a long time in jail. Ms. Chen Shih mentioned he had remained haunted by these instances.
“He advised me that through the day he knew find out how to let go of his hatred, however these issues would come again to search out him at night time in his desires,” she mentioned. “All that left a deep mark on him.”
