Activists want to make May 19 a day of remembrance for victims of Taiwan's "White Terror" era of authoritarian persecution.
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00:00Lu Jianxing guides a tour group through the prison where he spent years of his life.
00:05Today, it's a human rights museum, a memorial to victims of Taiwan's white terror era of
00:10authoritarian rule.
00:12But in Lu's time here, it was just one of many places holding perceived dissidents.
00:21Before his arrest in the 1960s, Lu was an idealistic young man.
00:25Taiwan had been under strict martial law since just after World War II, and there were no
00:29signs of change.
00:31But students like him were determined to make Taiwan a better place all the same.
00:36They bristled when an American exchange student wrote a newspaper piece calling Taiwanese
00:41society selfish and cold.
00:43And they responded by forming a community service society to prove how civic-minded
00:47Taiwan's people could be.
00:50They were tolerated at first.
00:52The China Youth Corps, then a paramilitary group with ties to the Kuomintang government,
00:56even gave them support.
00:59But in time, Lu and his friends got tired of the Youth Corps' control.
01:02So they broke away and founded their own unsanctioned group, something historians of the period
01:08say was a dangerous move.
01:27Lu's group only had a few dozen members, but that was enough to spark paranoia in official
01:32circles.
01:33A police report from 1969 claims the group was preparing to overthrow the government
01:38and had overseas connections.
01:40About a month after this report, police fanned out in the dead of night to arrest whichever
01:44members they could find.
02:06Lu would eventually be sentenced to life in prison for his group's activities.
02:26Behind bars, he was regularly tortured.
02:28Still, when news of his life sentence came out, the whole cell block cheered, because
02:33there were worse fates.
02:35One of Lu's comrades was, by order of the president himself, to be executed, a fate
02:39he only escaped after developing severe mental illness in prison.
02:44In 1975, the story of Lu and his comrades takes a turn.
02:48Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled Taiwan during the White Terror and most of martial law, died.
02:54Life sentences were commuted, in Lu's case to 15 years.
02:58He walked free in February of 1982, and later became well-known as a writer under the pen
03:04name Lu Yu.
03:06A few years after Lu's release, Taiwan began to transform.
03:09Forty-three years of martial law ended in 1987.
03:13In time, free, multi-party elections began, and led to an eventual reckoning with the
03:17dark corners of Taiwan's past.
03:20Lu is one of at least 20,000 people who were persecuted under the White Terror.
03:25Not all survived to tell their story.
03:28Now there's a move to create a national memorial day for these victims on May 19th.
03:34That's something former president Tsai Ing-wen said she would ask the government to look
03:37into before she left office.
03:39The creation of the May 19th White Terror is not just a memory, but also a reminder
03:46of the history of our next generation of democratic rights activists.
03:50It also reminds us to continue to pass on the spirit of struggle for democracy.
03:56With the political will to make it happen, Taiwan could soon have a new date in its calendar
04:00of memorials to this traumatic period of its past.
04:03The scars of which its survivors still carry.
04:07Luffy Lee and John Van Triest for Taiwan Plus.