Author and Human Rights Activist Bo Yang Passes Away

In a gesture calculated to show that he had moved beyond his tribulations and returned to Nature, Bo Yang, who in his own words had "been to Hell and back," requested that his ashes be scattered on the ocean near Green Island, where he had been incarcerated. A lifelong critic of government and dogged defender of human rights, his example sets a high standard for modern intellectuals determined to make the world a better place.

Born Kuo Ting-sheng in Henan Province in 1920, he later renamed himself Kuo Yi-tung, and, after coming to Taiwan, became a writer. His career here had five distinct phases-ten years of fiction, ten years of essays, ten years of prison, five years as a columnist, and ten years of historiography-all of which brought him nothing but hardship.

In 1950, while employed at Pingtung Agricultural School, Bo Yang was imprisoned for seven months for listening to communist radio broadcasts. He published his first novel The Locusts Fly Southeast under the name Kuo Yi-tung soon after his release, and with it won a KMT anticommunist literature award.

In the 1960s, he began writing a column for the Independence Evening Post under the pen name Bo Yang. He also founded a publishing house that printed collections of the articles and essays he produced daily for the paper's literary supplements. The collections all went on to be bestsellers, elevating Bo Yang into the then-rarefied ranks of Taiwanese literati possessing their own car.

He was a sharp critic of what he called China's traditional "soy-sauce-vat culture," and his satirical inclinations, ready wit, and frankness made him a constant thorn in the side of the political authorities.

In 1961, he wrote a series of articles he called "11 Years of War in an Alien Land" under the penname Teng Ko-pao. The stories concerned the KMT soldiers abandoned in the retreat from mainland China who went on to establish guerilla bases in the jungles along the border between Burma and China's Yunnan Province. By describing their heroic sacrifices, Bo Yang created a public outcry.

Bo Yang's troubles began in earnest in 1968, when he translated the word "fellow" as "my fellow countrymen" in a Popeye comic strip that ran in the China Daily News. Intelligence officials read the line as a jab at one of President Chiang Kai-shek's turns of phrase. Worse, the strip had Popeye and his son Swee'Pea enjoying themselves so much bumming around a desert island that they forgot to go home. Officials took this as a reference to Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo's rule of Taiwan. Investigators claimed that Bo Yang was a communist spy who had attacked the nation's leadership, and sentenced him to 12 years. They shipped him off to a military prison in 1969, then removed him to Green Island three years later. Pressure from Amnesty International and other human rights organizations ultimately led to his release in 1977.

Bo Yang wrote continuously in prison, and completed his Outline of the History of the Chinese People while incarcerated. Sales of his previously banned work also boomed at this time, in both legitimate and pirate editions.

He kept on writing after his release. In 1983, he began what was to become a decade of work on his own 72-volume colloquial translation of the classic Zizhi Tongjian ("History as a Mirror"). Bo Yang painted his unofficial histories in broad strokes, popularizing historical material by turning the rules of academic historiography on their head.

In 1985, he published The Ugly Chinaman and the Crisis of Chinese Culture, which sold well not only in Taiwan but also in China, where it became popular in pirated editions after being banned. The book, which is critical of Chinese culture and character faults, ignited intense debate within the global Chinese community.

His final written work was an introduction to Bo Yang Says..., a book published in China in 2006. In his conclusion to that piece, Bo Yang showed that he was a man of character even in his old age, writing: "I sang no paeans to leaders, but spoke instead to the people."

The misfortunes Bo Yang experienced in his own life fostered the acute interest he showed in human rights issues in his later years. He established Amnesty International Taiwan at age 75, and personally attended the unveiling of the human rights memorial on Green Island in 1999. Ever in the public eye, Bo Yang's days were a mix of personal misfortune and creative endeavor. Though his life has now come to a close, his legend and his work remain indelibly printed on Taiwan's history.

Bo Yang returned to his Green Island prison in 1999 for the unveiling of a human rights memorial. The inscription he provided for the memorial reads: "In that era, how many mothers spent long nights weeping for their children imprisoned on this island?" Bo Yang fervently hoped that a democratic Taiwan would never again frame its citizens.