From Prison to Freedom:

The Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, a campus of the National Human Rights Museum located in New Taipei City’s Xindian District, stands at a site where victims of political oppression were held in confinement during the authoritarian era. Today it has been converted into a human rights park that is open to visitors from all over the world.

Entering a historic site

Located just a few steps away from Xiulang Bridge, the park occupies the site of the former Taiwan Garrison Command’s Military Law Division. After the termination of the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion in 1991, it became an important historic site bearing witness to authoritarian rule.

Chien Hsueh-yi, who was hired in 2007 to design the park’s entrance area, chose “imprisonment” and “freedom” as the area’s two themes. A number of scattered bare concrete walls of varying heights stand like sharp knives in the entranceway to the park. At the same time, they provide for easily accessible entrance.

Located behind the entrance installation and integrated with it, the Human Rights Memorial was added in 2015. It features rows of Indian black granite plaques engraved with the names of persons who fell victim to political oppression from 1945 through 1992. Each name represents a person who once had dreams, a family, and a future.

Moving forward through the park, the visitor comes to the First Court, where the defendants in the Kaohsiung Incident were put on public trial in 1980. Huang Hsin-chieh, Shih Ming-teh, Annette Lu, and Chen Chu were among the democracy activists who appeared as defendants during the proceedings.

At a spot deeper into the site than any other, one comes to the Military Law Division’s detention facility, the Ren-Ai Building, which was the main incarceration facility at the site. Ever so many souls seeking freedom were imprisoned here.

The exterior wall of the military courthouse is emblazoned with four large Chinese characters: gong zheng lian ming (“impartial and upright”). The history of the courthouse lends the inscription a supreme irony.

Defendants from the Kaohsiung Incident were put on trial at the First Court. Due to intense pressure at home and abroad, a rare decision was taken to allow the proceedings to be attended by domestic and international observers and journalists.

Survivors of the White Terror

The fates of countless individuals were rewritten following sudden arrests and trials during the White Terror years. Our park guide today, John Chen, is more than just a guide. He himself lived through every­thing he’s talking about.

Now 90 years old and using an umbrella as a cane, Chen leads us into the infirmary where he was assigned to work for more than nine years while incarcerated. As a young medical student in Japan, he had taken part in the activities of a Taiwan independence organization and came under surveillance by intelligence agencies. After returning to Taiwan, he was arrested while on honeymoon with his new wife. He was charged with “committing an overt act with the intent to overthrow the government by illegal means.” At the age of 32, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The judgment was handed down on 21 July 1969, the very day that the US astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. Laments Chen: “Mankind had reached the moon, but Taiwan was still so closed off.”

For more than eight months, the prison authorities let him out of his cell roughly two days per week, a mere 15 minutes each time. Eventually, however, he was assigned to work in the infirmary, drawing on his medical expertise. The persons under his care included some 300 fellow political prisoners as well as soldiers and officers from the Military Law Division and their family members.

John Chen has returned as a guide to the infirmary where he was assigned to work while incarcerated. The familiar environment brings back all sorts of memories.

To evade the prying eyes of prison guards, Chen wrote his prison diaries in Japanese. Shown here is a manuscript from January 1971, in the collection of the National Human Rights Museum.

Chen says that the lists of political prisoners he compiled would be slipped into loads of laundry to be spirited out of the prison and sent abroad to make sure the world understood the truth about conditions in Taiwan.

Revealing dark truths

Keeping diaries was his way of staying defiant while in prison. Using writing pads or the margins of printed matter, he would note his observations of daily prison life, and record his fears. These diaries were recently published by the National Human Rights Museum.

The government in those years often declared that Taiwan had no political prisoners, but lists of political prisoners were leaked on a number of occasions from the Jing-Mei Detention Center. Chen confides that he took advantage of his work in the infirmary to compile lists of political prisoners, which he would deliver to fellow prisoners. They would then slip them into loads of laundry to be spirited out of the prison and sent abroad, to let the entire world know the truth about conditions in Taiwan.

Chen’s sentence was reduced upon the death of Chiang Kai-shek in 1975, but the long, hard years of prison life had driven him to drink. In the end, when preparing to administer an injection he had to first take a swig just to ensure a steady hand.

When asked whether he doesn’t harbor resentment after all he went through, Chen answers with utter composure: “Those were the times we lived in, there’s nothing to complain about.” But then he shifts to a joking tone: “I’m still alive at age 90. My wife is still here, and she’s still the original, I never switched. Not bad. I’m a lucky man.”

Communal bathrooms, shackles, listening devices, and heavy steel doors made up the suffocating daily details of prison life. The memorial park preserves and restores such details, making buildings serve as witnesses to the history of the years when many were deprived of their freedom.

For the sake of memory

The National Human Rights Museum was established in 2018 as part of Taiwanese society’s efforts to implement transitional justice. Chen returned to the place where he had been held prisoner to help plan the park’s exhibitions, and to let others understand exactly how the site looked when he was there. When asked why he would be willing to set foot in that place once again, he responds: “Any regime can make mistakes, but we must face them head on. The preservation of the memorial park is a meaningful thing. We should let today’s young people know what a tragic place Taiwan was back in those years.”

At the end of our interview, we walk with Chen to his car and he drives back home to have lunch with his wife. Life keeps moving forward, and the stories we choose to preserve will accompany new generations as they contemplate the precious value of freedom, human rights, and democracy. 

Each name on the Human Rights Memorial represents a person who once had dreams, a family, and a future, whose lives were brutally cut short or cruelly disrupted by the times.

Having survived the White Terror, John Chen continues to move forward. One man steps out of a prison cell, while society makes a historic leap by learning to walk toward freedom.