Read an Excerpt
Forbidden Nation
A History of Taiwan
By Jonathan Manthorpe
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Manthorpe
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-61424-6
CHAPTER 1
TWO SHOTS ON CHINHUA ROAD
No one heard the two pistol shots or saw the gunman amid the continuous, overwhelming rattling roar and billowing smoke of the strings of exploding firecrackers. Remembering the scene three weeks later, Vice President Annette Lu was sure she heard the cracks of the two shots above the staccato noise of the fireworks. At the time, though, the sharper sound of the gun did not register in her mind. Yet it was Lu who first thought something was wrong. She felt a strong "impact" on her right knee. Recalling the incident in a statement issued a few days later, Lu described the force of the bullet hitting her as strangely heavy and painful, enough to make her cry out. Her immediate conclusion was the logical one: Lu imagined she had been hit by the empty cardboard casing of one of the firecrackers that were exploding everywhere and are a common feature of Chinese festive occasions. It wasn't until she looked down and saw a rip in her slacks seeping blood that she knew it was something more. She turned to Taiwan's president, Chen Shuibian, standing next to her in the back of an open-topped Jeep Wrangler in a motorcade parading slowly through the island's southern city of Tainan. Chen, she noticed, was holding his stomach with one hand and waving to the crowd with the other. It was then that she noticed the bullet hole in the windscreen, just above the head of the president's chief bodyguard, Lt. Gen. Chen Tsai-fu, who was sitting in the front passenger seat. Lu pointed out the bullet hole to the president who, shouting to be heard above the din of the fireworks, said: "I kept thinking we were hit by firecrackers. Why didn't you tell me earlier?"
It was March 19, 2004, the last day of campaigning in a passionate, fierce, and sometimes verbally vitriolic contest for the Taiwanese presidency. Chen and Lu were seeking to return to office in only the third open presidential elections since the island's ponderous, two-decade transition from one-party military rule. They had won a three-cornered contest in the 2000 election with only 39 percent of the vote and ousted the Kuomintang, the old national party of China, which had ruled Taiwan since 1945. That had been a signal moment in Chinese history. For the first time in any predominantly ethnic Chinese society there was a peaceful and legal democratic change of administration. The coming to power of Chen's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) with its emphasis on asserting the distinct cultural identity and independence of Taiwan and its 23 million people, was also a blow to China. Beijing claims sovereignty over the island, which is just one hundred miles (one hundred and sixty kilometers) off its southeastern coast. But the mainland Communists have never controlled the island, which has been a de facto independent state since the end of China's civil war in 1949. Taiwan then became the refuge for defeated Kuomintang leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and some two million of his followers. The long-term policy of Chen and the DPP is to affirm the country's independence and to edge Beijing into giving up its claim to Taiwan. Beijing responded to the election of Chen and Lu in 2000 by deploying hundreds of missiles aimed at the island and constantly repeating its threat to invade Taiwan if there were moves toward internationally recognized independence. Undaunted by Beijing's threats, in their first four years in office Chen and Lu pursued policies boosting "Taiwan consciousness" and a sense of island nationalism, often to the neglect of more immediate economic and social problems.
The neglect of bread-and-butter issues meant their reelection was anything but certain. Samples of public opinion before the 2004 campaign indicated Kuomintang presidential candidate Lien Chan and his running mate James Soong had a lead of about 10 percentage points. They should have been able to win handily. But they presented a lackluster campaign and their advantage dwindled. Polls taken in the last days of the campaign showed a very close race, but with the challengers Lien and Soong having a marginal advantage. However, Chen and Lu skillfully controlled the agenda of election issues and insisted that the central questions revolved around Taiwanese identity and nationhood. A vote for Lien and Soong, the DPP campaign strategists implied, was a vote for Taiwan's submission to China. A victory for Chen and Lu in 2004 would, therefore, be a political watershed just as profound as the change of administration in 2000. For the first time a majority of the island's people would be giving open support to Taiwan's independence movement. Such an outcome would mark the failure of China's attempts to lure Taiwan by peaceful means into unification with the mainland. It would present Beijing with few options but to focus even more fixedly on a military solution.
A Chen and Lu victory would be just as destabilizing for Taiwan's chief ally, the United States. A return to power with a majority vote by the DPP presidential and vice presidential candidates would make it near impossible for Washington to continue with its purposefully ambiguous "one China" policy. (For nearly 30 years successive U.S. administrations have managed to maintain good relations with both Beijing and Taipei by asserting that there is only "one China" but refusing to say what that means. Does it mean Washington accepts there is one China and Taiwan is part of it? That is Beijing's position. Or does it mean there is one China, but Taiwan is a separate country?) The utility of this piece of diplomatic obfuscation began to collapse with Taiwan's transition to democracy, which started with the lifting of martial law in 1987. The reelection of Chen and Lu, with their clear intention of finally severing any pretence that Taiwan is or will ever be a willing part of China, would force Washington to confront the conflicts and paradoxes in its policy. That risked putting the United States on a collision course with China. So it was easy to imagine many motives for attempting to affect the outcome of the election by shooting Chen and Lu.
The assassination attempt was in the early afternoon as Chen and Lu were leading a last, morale-boosting parade through Tainan city, Chen's hometown and the heartland of support for their Democratic Progressive Party. They were due to return to Taipei later to prepare for a final, highly choreographed rally that night.
The gunman's plan was simple and effective. The lone assassin is always the most difficult and unpredictable assailant for security staff to prepare against. And police security was muddled and ineffectual, as a subsequent investigation showed. It was later found that police had received intelligence reports that an attempt might be made on Chen's life, but they disregarded the information. That dismissal was remarkable. Taiwan has a long record of violent repression during four hundred years of control by various colonial masters. And in recent years there had been several politically sponsored murders, most engineered by the old ruling party, the Kuomintang. The memory of these killings quickly fuelled rampant rumor mongering after the shooting. But on the bright and cheerful afternoon of March 19 the police apparently chose not to recall those dark incidents, and security was lax. Neither Chen nor Lu was wearing a bulletproof vest and bodyguards were not stationed close enough to the couple to block the line of sight of any would-be assassins.
Police believe the gunman stood at the back of the crowd lining the route of the motorcade close to No. 2 Chinhua Road in Tainan. He waited until the Jeep carrying Chen and Lu was about 20 feet (seven meters) away and then fired twice. It was only the gunman's lack of skill that saved Chen's life. The Jeep was approaching the gunman at an angle and about 10 miles an hour (16 km/h). It is always a difficult shot to hit a moving target approaching at an angle. To do so with a pistol rather than a more accurate rifle is even more difficult. The gunman had to aim ahead of Chen, allowing for the speed of the Jeep and the time it would take after he pulled the trigger for the cartridge to detonate and the bullet to travel to the target. With both shots he overestimated and aimed too far ahead of his target. The first bullet punched through the windscreen of the Jeep well ahead of Chen, narrowly missed bodyguard Lt. Gen. Chen sitting in the front seat, and grazed Lu's knee before burying itself in the upholstery of the rear seat. When police retrieved the slug, microscopic examination showed fragments of glass, confirming its path through the windscreen.
The gunman fired a second time almost immediately after the first shot. By this time, the Jeep was almost parallel with him. The gunman judged the second shot better than the first, but again he aimed too far ahead of his target, the president. The bullet gashed the surface of Chen's stomach but did not penetrate below the surface fat. Doctors said later even a fractional difference in the assassin's aim could have been fatal for the president.
Chen was wearing a gray golf jacket with an elasticized waist. The bullet punched through the right side of the jacket and then the shirt and t-shirt the president was wearing underneath. Doctors later found a wound four and one-quarter inches long (11-cm) and three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) wide gouged across Chen's stomach just below the navel. The bullet then tore through the left side of Chen's t-shirt and his shirt. At this point the slug's energy was spent. It could not get through the thicker material of the president's coat and was found inside the elasticized waist.
After Annette Lu cried out to the security officers that she and president Chen had been shot, it took the bodyguards several minutes to work out what to do. They belatedly clustered around the Jeep while debating where to take Chen and Lu. It should not have been a difficult decision. Officials of Chen's DPP said later that in planning for the visit, the Chi-Mei Medical Center just outside the city in Tainan County had been designated the emergency center rather than the closer public hospital in the city center. The more distant Chi-Mei center was chosen because organizers anticipated that crowds of people waiting to see the cavalcade would block the route to the city hospital. On arrival at the medical center Chen walked in unaided while Lu, now hobbling from her knee wound, had to be helped in. Inside the clinic doctors quickly removed the president's top clothes to examine the wound while Chen starting making calls on his cell phone. Chen spoke first with his wife, Wu Shuchen, to assure her he was not seriously injured. He then called his closest advisor, the secretary general to the presidential office, Chiou I-jen, to set the national security apparatus in motion.
Chiou called a meeting of the National Security Council, which ordered the immediate upgrading of the island's state of military and police readiness to face an invasion. Tens of thousands of troops were called to duty and many were unable to vote the following day as a result. This became grist to the conspiracy theory mill. It is usually reckoned that support for the Kuomintang in the military is higher than the national average, about 75 percent, because pre-democracy culture is still strong in armed forces training. The denying of votes to many thousands of soldiers who were required to stay on duty was seen as evidence of a conspiracy by the president to cut support for Lien and Soong.
The inevitable first thought for any Taiwanese administration after an attempted assassination is that Beijing might be behind it and that the "decapitation" of the island's government is a prelude to invasion. So one of the first people swept into action was the head of Taiwan's National Security Bureau, Tsai Tsao-ming. He flew immediately from Taipei to Tainan to take charge of security and the shooting investigation. While in transit Tsai telephoned the U.S. military's Pacific command center in Hawaii. He also called Washington. Tsai's calls were to inform the Americans of what had happened and to see if there were any indications that the attempt on Chen's life was the first move in an invasion by China. Tsai was given assurance that American satellites and spy planes in their regular monitoring of Chinese military communications and activities had seen no signs of any preparations for an invasion. Those calls and the ready responses Tsai received emphasizes the close functional alliance between Taiwan and the United States on regional security matters.
The information from the United States suggesting Taiwan was not under imminent threat of invasion from China was a relief to all those trying to assess the implications of the shooting. It didn't remove China entirely from the list of suspects, but it did shift attention toward the Kuomintang with its history of politically motivated assassinations. In the mid 1980s, when it was beginning to become obvious that military rule by the Kuomintang was becoming increasingly untenable, government security organizations became frantic and irrational in their attempts to halt the tide of history. One such organization, the Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense (IBMND), hit on the idea of using gunmen from the island's triad gangs to remove or intimidate the government's political opponents. The triads began life many hundreds of years ago as nationalist organizations with a spiritual belief in the intertwined relationship of three elements of the Chinese nation — heaven, earth, and the people — hence the name triad. Over the centuries, however, the triads evolved into secret criminal gangs with elaborate initiation rites designed to instill life-long loyalty to the brotherhood. The then deputy director of the IBMND, Major General Hu Yi-min, pursued the idea of utilizing triads and developed a working relationship with Chen Ch'i-li, the boss of the Bamboo Union gang. In 1984 a Taiwanese journalist, Henry Liu, then living in exile in California and a naturalized American citizen, was close to finishing and publishing a book tht was believed, with good reason, to be heavily critical of the island's then president, Chiang Ching-kuo. Major General Hu hoped Liu could be removed before he could complete the book. American police who investigated the killing came to think that Chiang Ching-kuo's dissolute son, Alex, was the necessary link with the "royal family" who approved the killing. Bamboo Union boss Chen was contracted to do the job. The management of the shooting of Henry Liu in the garage of his home just outside San Francisco in October 1984 illustrates the stupidity that can overtake such ventures. Before Chen set off on his assignment on September 14, senior IBMND officers threw a farewell banquet for him. And when Chen returned to Taiwan's Chiang Kai-shek International Airport on October 21, bringing with him the two gunmen who shot Liu, IBMND officers were there to greet him and applaud him for a job well done. What never seemed to have occurred to them was that American intelligence agencies might get wind of the operation. Washington's National Security Agency monitored several highly incriminating telephone calls from Chen in California to his IBMND managers back in Taiwan. The killing of Liu, an American, generated intense anger in the U.S. administration, which led to accelerated pressure from Washington on Taipei to speed up political reform. So, far from stalling political change in Taiwan, the killing of Liu had the reverse effect.
At about the same time, 1985, an attempt was made to kill Chen Shuibian's wife, Wu Shu-chen, that left her paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a wheelchair. Chen had sought election as commissioner of Tainan County. He lost the election, but afterward both Chen and his wife traveled independently around the county to thank supporters. At one stop Wu was hit by a truck in a dead-end street. The truck driver made a concerted effort to kill Wu by backing up and running her over several times. It has never been established beyond doubt whether the truck driver acted on his own behalf or on instruction from a faction within the Kuomintang. But he never stood trial and his action enhanced greatly the popular view of Chen and his wife as victims of state terrorism and champions of Taiwanese aspirations.
Another more recent killing with official connections failed equally in its objectives. On December 9, 1993, the body of Taiwanese navy captain Yin Chingfeng was found on a beach. Military coroners delivered a quick verdict of death by drowning. But Yin's widow demanded an independent autopsy that concluded he had been bludgeoned to death. The case aroused interest because Captain Yin was one of the officers overseeing a U.S. $2.8 billion deal for Taiwan to buy six Lafayette-class frigates from France. Taiwan's diplomatic isolation makes arms purchases for the island's forces difficult. Arms sales to Taiwan always require strong political will in the selling countries, where there is bound to be pressure from China not to go through with the sale. There is therefore an obvious opportunity for corruption among both buyers and sellers. It quickly became known that Captain Yin was unhappy with the way the agreement was progressing, did not believe Taiwan was getting its money's worth, and further believed that massive bribery had been involved in France's acquisition of the contract. The shock waves from Captain Yin's death reverberated for years. In France the revelations led to the downfall of the foreign minister, Roland Dumas, and the imprisonment of several officials in companies that had laundered the bribes. In Taiwan several senior officers were sacked or imprisoned and the upper echelons of the military were scoured for evidence of affiliations to triad gangs. Investigators looked unsuccessfully for links to the Green Gang, the Shanghai triad in which Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek had begun his career as a gunman in the 1920s and that still has tentacles in Taiwan's military.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Forbidden Nation by Jonathan Manthorpe. Copyright © 2009 Jonathan Manthorpe. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
