BY JENNIFER RUTH

China’s retaliation for Nancy Pelosi’s trip continued last week, as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a second wave of live fire drills around Taiwan. “China has threatened Taiwan militarily for years, and it continues to upgrade its efforts,” Taiwan’s foreign minister Joseph Wu said at a press conference on August 9th. Wu stated that the drills appeared to be preparation for a future invasion. If China were to invade Taiwan, it would be attempting to annex a territory in which only 2% of the people identify as solely Chinese. As China’s military encircled the island with its exercises, I sat down with Shiu Wen-Tang and Chen Li-Fu, President and Vice President of the Taiwan Association of University Professors (TAUP), at their offices in Taipei. They explained the organization’s background and its role in the ongoing battle for academic freedom in Taiwan. Accompanying me to assist with translation was Linda Gail Arrigo, an activist and researcher who was involved in Taiwan’s democratic movement.

When TAUP was established in 1990, it was, in Chen Li-Fu’s words, “a revolutionary organization” in that the Taiwanese were only just emerging from thirty-seven years of martial law and were still subject to penal codes criminalizing speech critical of the government as “seditious.” Its core mission is “to promote political democracy, academic freedom, social justice, economic fairness, cultural improvement, environmental protection, and world peace.” It holds regular conferences and seminars to raise awareness on issues such as Taiwan independence, transitional justice and China’s disinformation campaigns. It publishes an annual journal, protests violations of academic freedom, organizes public events on important historical dates, lobbies the government to promote Taiwanese language and culture, and takes positions on political matters important to the citizenry of the self-governed island.

TAUP President Shiu Wen-Tang graciously agreed to be interviewed for the Academe blog. Shiu recently retired from Academia Sinica where he was a research fellow with the Institute of Modern History for 32 years. Academia Sinica is Taiwan’s prestigious research-only institution, akin to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

JR: What is the purpose of TAUP and when did you get involved in the organization?

SWT: What I want to explain is that in early 1990s Taiwan, although martial law had been rescinded [in 1987], Article 100 which made thought crimes punishable still existed. There was also a blacklist of people who were not allowed to return from overseas because they had expressed criticisms of Chiang Kai Shek and the Kuomintang (KMT). So a group of professors advocated independence and created the organization. At that time I had just returned from Paris, France and did not join immediately. I watched its development closely, however, as my friend Chen Yi-shen was involved. [Chen Yi-shen, one of Taiwan’s most important historians on the White Terror period, is the current president of Academia Historica and a former chairperson of TAUP.] I joined the organization after the election of Ma Ying-jeou in 2008 because Ma Ying-jeou’s election brought a new crisis to Taiwan in that Ma was too pro-China. [Ma’s pro-China policies triggered mass social protests throughout his two terms.]

JR: Can you talk about the history of higher education in Taiwan, the 1994 Education Reform Act, and how and why the latter did not transform the system as much as people might have hoped or how it backfired in a sense? [The 1994 Act amended the University Act in order “to give Taiwanese universities the authority to decide on internal affairs with less external interference (gradually),” according to Jason Cheng-Cheng Yang in “University Autonomy of Higher Education in Taiwan: Developments and Consequences.”]

History of Academic Freedom, Book by TAUP member Lin Yu-Ti

SWT: The KMT controlled educational institutions and curriculum entirely before Taiwan transitioned to democracy. [And, despite the end of one-party dictatorship, the KMT remained in power until the election of Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party in 2000.] From 1950 to 1970 140,000 people were arrested for political crimes. Everybody’s mouth was sealed. So under those conditions it was very difficult for a Taiwanese consciousness to coalesce as the political and educational elites were all mainlanders [people who had come with the KMT in 1949]. Any Taiwanese who stuck out to challenge this China-only and China-centered consciousness was arrested. Because there was no transitional justice prior to the 1994 law on academic autonomy, what the academic autonomy law did was to in effect give legal backing to the conservative forces that had been in control of resources and in power all along. It gave them legal backing for their original stronghold.

On the surface it looks like you can research anything you want, but, really, when you put in your application to the National Science and Technology Council, if you want to research something like the 228 incident, transitional justice, or the White Terror period, you will not get your research funded. Funding is very important when faculty go up for promotion. It is also an important and common way to supplement a professor’s income because our salaries are low. However, the people who are going to be reviewing the applications are mostly the elite who received KMT-dominated education up to the 1980s. All the professional societies and disciplinary associations that were established in the name of China and to study China early on still exist today. Before 1990, there was no place for Taiwan in the educational curriculum. There was no knowledge of Taiwan history, geography, culture, etc. Nothing in the field of higher education recognized Taiwan’s place in history and Taiwanese people’s civil rights. The older educational elites will find offensive those research applications that focus on the White Terror or Taiwan identity or that criticize Chiang Kai Shek or Chiang Ching Kuo [Chiang Kai Shek’s son who lifted martial law during his presidency but had been the director of the secret police during the deadliest years of the White Terror period]. Without real transitional justice, the mindset stays the same because they were educated under martial law and conditioned by it. They are not bad people but they end up presiding over an unequal distribution of resources because of their mindset. In principle we all agree that it is not academically correct to consider whether someone is a mainlander or Taiwanese, but in actual practice it is clear that mainlanders historically controlled more resources and that there continues to be an unequal distribution of resources.

I remember the demonstrations in 1994 held by the students and young professors who were fighting for academic autonomy. The students from National Taiwan University insisted that they represented the  People’s Taiwan University not National Taiwan University. [This emphasized that they did not support Nationalist (KMT) policy.] They didn’t dream that academic autonomy would end up being a conservative thing.

JR: Can you talk about your organization’s involvement in transitional justice efforts?

SWT: We have held several conferences for the demands of the victims of the KMT, including reparations for the families of political prisoners. We requested the declassification of the documents of the white terror and military courts. We helped prepare the legislation that created the Transitional Justice Commission. [The Commission is an independent governmental agency tasked with promoting transitional justice through increasing the accessibility of archives, removing authoritarian symbols, and proposing other forms of redress for acts of judicial injustice under the KMT. Its term of activity ended on May 30, 2022.] Of course we’re not satisfied with the work it accomplished as, to take one example, some 3000 Chiang Kai Shek statues remain erected in Taiwan. And, of course, the map of China remains imposed on Taipei and most of the roads and important sites are based on those in China so there is so much work still be done. Supposedly the Executive Yuan is going to set up a governmental organ to replace the Commission but we don’t know anything specific about this yet.

JR: In the United States, some of the states are passing laws restricting how we can talk about our nation’s history, especially certain subjects, particularly on race, that the right-wing legislators consider “divisive”.  Do you see any parallels in Taiwan?

SWT: Before the 1990s there were many things such as the 228 incident and the White Terror period mentioned above that Taiwanese could not talk about. After the1990s, they are not legally forbidden to be talked about but the mindset has not changed.

JR: What do you want American academics to know about China’s interference in Taiwanese intellectual and academic freedom?

SWT:  There are many things that China does: it tries to sway Taiwanese attitudes by financially supporting youth trips to China and other activities. Here are two examples. On the one hand, if a student can’t get into a top school in Taiwan, he/she might be encouraged by China to attend a prestigious school in China. All the personnel from China to recruit students go through a training program. The training will include who the personnel should favor and whom they can have contact with.

On the other hand, in order to be allowed to recruit and enroll students from China, a number of Taiwanese universities signed agreements with China to not discuss topics China considers taboo such as Taiwan independence  [See this article for more details about this scandal and the subsequent outcry.]

(L-R) President of TAUP Wen-Tang Shiu, Linda Gail Arrigo, Jennifer Ruth, and Vice President of TAUP Li-Fu Chen. August 9, 2022. Taipei, Taiwan.

If you criticize China in your academic work, you won’t get a visa. The interference even goes to the point that Taiwan’s academic environment is affected by China pressuring other countries. Professional associations and international publishers cater to Chinese rules. Such rules include how to identify Taiwan. So our professors are often prohibited from identifying their institutional affiliations honestly. For example, SAGE publisher refuses to let faculty members identify “Academia Sinica” as “Academia Sinica, Taiwan”, although co-authors of other nationalities are allowed to name the countries for their institutions. [See this recent Academe blog post “Academic Freedom On Fire From Chinese Censorship” for more on this topic.]

JR: Anything else you’d like to say to AAUP members?

SWT:  AAUP and TAUP have a common purpose and that is to protect academic freedom but the big difference is that AAUP faces internal authoritarian threats [SWT refers here to the legislative restrictions] but TAUP faces a big external authoritarian threat in the form of China.

Note: At one point in the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Professor Shiu Wen-Tang made a very important point which I’d like to add here. He explained that when then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and then-Premier of China Zhou Enlai negotiated the  Joint Communiqué of the United States of America and the People’s Republic of China (also known as the Shanghai Communiqué) in 1972, the “one China” policy document that continues to shape international discussion regarding Taiwan, the Chinese mainlanders on the island were less than 15% of the population and the voice of the majority of the people was silenced by martial law.

Jennifer Ruth is a contributing editor and the author, with Michael Bérubé, of It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom(2022). She is currently researching academic freedom issues on a MOFA fellowship in Taiwan, where she wrote this editorial for The Taipei Times.