On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region and its National Security Task Force the Hoover Institution held a Taiwan Roundtable Discussion On Cold War / Martial Law Formations of Taiwanese America on Monday, May 13, 2024 from 2-3:30 p.m. PT in Stauffer Auditorium.
From the 1960s to 1980s, more than a hundred thousand Taiwanese students migrated to the US for graduate study in science, technology, engineering, and medicine fields as part of the special Cold War relationship between the US and the authoritarian Kuomintang (KMT) government in Taiwan. This same time period overlapped with a 38-year period of martial law in Taiwan, during which the KMT surveilled and terrorized Taiwanese nationals not only in Taiwan but also in the U.S., Japan, and other locations around the world. In the U.S., this occurred with the full knowledge and tacit permission of the US state.
With information drawn from extensive interviews and archival research, we'll discuss how Taiwanese students were politicized and organized themselves on U.S. university campuses under these dual conditions of selective Cold War migration and martial law, and how their politics were more heterogeneous and far-reaching than how they are typically remembered today.
FEATURING
Wendy Cheng
Professor
Chair, Intercollegiate American Studies Program
Core Faculty, Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies
Scripps College
Wendy Cheng is Professor of American Studies and core faculty in the Intercollegiate Department of Asian American Studies at Scripps College. She is the author of Island X: Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism (University of Washington Press, 2023) and The Changs Next Door to the Díazes: Remapping Race in Suburban California (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), and coauthor of A People’s Guide to Los Angeles (University of California Press, 2012).
MODERATOR
Kharis Templeman
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution
Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia.
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Transcript
Kharis Templeman: [00:00:00] Welcome. I'm Kharis Templeman. I'm a research fellow here at the Hoover Institution, and I work on Taiwan. I lead our project on Taiwan in the Indo Pacific region. and it is my distinct pleasure today to introduce our guest, Wendy. Wendy Cheng or Wendy Cheng, depending on which language you're speaking, who has flown up this morning.
she works at, Scripps College where she's a professor of American Studies. and she has a brand new book out, fairly new, brand new, I can still say brand new, called Island X, Taiwanese Student Migrants, Campus Spies, and Cold War Activism. Professor Jung is a professor of American studies and the core faculty in the intercollegiate department of Asian American studies at Scripps College.
she is the author of this book, but she has [00:01:00] also written two other things. the Jung's Next Door to the Diaz's, Remapping Race in Suburban California, and she's the co author of A People's Guide to Los Angeles. she holds a PhD in American Studies and Ethnicity from the University of Southern California.
An M. A. in Geography from UC Berkeley, and an A. B. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard. today's talk is going to draw from this book, and it is entitled Cold War, Martial Law Formations of Taiwanese America. and before I turn the floor over to, Professor Jung, I'd just like to offer a couple observations about this topic.
To be very blunt, I have been wishing for a long time that somebody would write this book. I think it's a pretty important book. The field of Taiwan studies in which I sit has grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. there's a tremendous amount of attention today [00:02:00] on Taiwan that there wasn't, 10 years ago.
but the issue of spying on and harassment of Taiwanese students in the United States during the martial law period in Taiwan has been almost invisible. In English language scholarship on Taiwan, and it remains quite a sensitive topic among Taiwanese and Taiwanese American communities. I think these episodes deserve a lot more attention than they've gotten so far.
first, let me make two points about this. First, the Taiwanese overseas student experience has deep historical significance for American academia. as Professor Jung documents in the book, there are dozens of campuses, in the United States that had documented cases of KMT martial law era spying on Taiwanese students.
And Stanford is among them. Let me reiterate that. The university we [00:03:00] are at now had agents of a foreign power. Reporting on the political attitudes and activities of students with real consequences, not just for themselves, but their families and friends back home in Taiwan. And it's important that people here, in my view, be aware of this history and the chilling effect that it had on academic freedom for these communities.
now Taiwan has come a long way since then. There's a really positive story there that's worth celebrating, but it is still wrestling with the legacies of that authoritarian era. And in the search for transitional justice in Taiwan, one of the most important and powerful acts has simply been truth telling.
In this book, Wendy tells a lot of difficult truths about the long reach of the martial law era regime in Taiwan, about U. S. government complicity or indifference, and about the struggles over Taiwan's status on American campuses. Struggles that have [00:04:00] mostly been forgotten about after Taiwan democratized and a new wave of students came in from other parts of the world and from the PRC, and changed the locus of contention.
Second, I think the debate over academic freedom and foreign coercion, that is documented in this book has obvious contemporary relevance in the United States. American universities are once again confronting questions about transnational repression or shark power or foreign influence operations or whatever other terms we might use to describe this phenomenon, especially but not only emanating from the authoritarian People's Republic of China today.
in the current debates over academic freedom that are roiling many university campuses around the country at this moment, I think we are in danger of missing a crucial distinction. The curtailing of speech, of academic inquiry, and of political organizing on university campuses via the covert, [00:05:00] coercive acts of a foreign government are a gross violation of that fundamental academic freedom.
And as Professor Jung documents, American universities In this episode did not respond particularly well to this coercive activity when it was directed against students from Taiwan. It is my hope that they will do a better job in the current environment now that students from other countries face similar problems.
Threats. so with that scene setting, I will turn the floor over to Professor Jung. she's going to speak for roughly half an hour. and then I will open with a couple broad moderating comments, and then we'll turn it over to you. So we do invite this to be a conversation, a dialogue with our guests today.
So
Good afternoon, everyone. It's an honor and pleasure to be here. and I want to thank Karis. so much for inviting me to be here. and also to Amy, I don't know if Amy's around, but for all of her [00:06:00] administrative assistance to get me here and make me very comfortable. So I'm going to jump in I'm excited to share a lot.
A slice of the book with you and some images that I think will be very interesting along the way and then I'm looking forward to the dialogue and conversation. On February 2nd, 2021, a solemn memorial was unveiled and dedicated on the campus of National Taiwan University. as you can see, it's a large opaque stone cube, slightly tilted with an opening in the middle large enough to walk into that space.
and it looks like a modernist tomb. according to the NTU Student Association president. young on the memorial was designed around the concept of emptiness to represent the opacity of historical truth and the blank terror of prison cells and interrogation room. So this memorial [00:07:00] marked the grim spot in front of the staircase of the National Taiwan University library, where 40 years earlier, Chen Wen-chen's body had been found.
And who I will also refer to English pronunciation as Chen was a NTU alum and a 31 year old assistant professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University. During a return trip to Taiwan with his family in the summer of 1981 had been called in for questioning at the Taiwan garrison command headquarters.
And was found dead the next morning. Chen's ultimately fatal interrogations were based on regular surveillance of his actions by KMT informers while he was living in the U. S. Which had begun when he was a graduate student at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and continued into his professor days in Pittsburgh.
Chen's life and death, as well as the ambiguous and [00:08:00] unfinished feeling of the memorial at NTU, show many of the dynamics I want to talk about today with regard to the dual Cold War and martial law formations of Taiwanese American history. First is that Chen was part of a larger migration of Taiwanese students to the U.
S., over 100, 000, who went for graduate study in science, technology, engineering, and medicine fields primarily, from the 1960s to 1980s as part of the special Cold War relationship between the U. S. and the then authoritarian KMT government. Second, is that the same time period overlapped with the 38 year period of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, during which the KMT surveilled and terrorized Taiwanese nationals not only in Taiwan, but also in the US, Japan and other locations around the world.
And in the US this happened with the full knowledge and tacit permission of the US [00:09:00] state. Finally, Chen's life and politics show how Taiwanese students were politicized and organized themselves on U. S. campuses under these dual conditions of selective Cold War migration and martial law, and also how their politics were more heterogeneous and far reaching than how they are typically remembered today.
So this may be familiar to some of you. so I, mentioned how over a hundred thousand Taiwanese went to the U. S., during the 60s And it was so common that, to this day, there's this free, well known saying, come, to, and to you, go, to America, right? That whole, Graduating classes of departments at the top universities were continuing on to graduate study in the US.
And during this time period, during the 1960s and 1970s, over 90 percent of Taiwanese students going abroad went to the US.[00:10:00]
So although in the U. S. Taiwanese Americans are often regarded as a relatively apolitical model minority group. Many Taiwanese of this generation were, in fact, overwhelmingly political, shaped by multiple imperial and colonial identities and influenced by the global social movements of their times.
And so on the left there, there's that's a photograph of Peter Huang Wenshong, who was a Sociology PhD student at Cornell, and a member of the World United Formalists for Independence who tried to assassinate Jiang Jingguo in New York in 1970. and then he and his accomplice were, supported by the Taiwanese community in the U.
S. they, who put up bail for him. There was a couple that mortgaged their house, in order to do that. And then they skipped the country. and then he lived in Sweden for many years before he returned, but that showed that the level of broad [00:11:00] support for this action that Adam. And on the right, is a, Diao movement, demonstration in Washington, D.
C., over the contested sovereignty of the Diaoyutai or Senkaku Islands. This is a, an issue that is still continuing into the present, but the point I want to make is that many students coming from Taiwan participated in this mass protest that drew over a thousand protesters and Was the largest ethnic Chinese student protest up until that time.
So these are just, snapshots of things that there's a lot more about in the book, but just to show the kinds of political worlds that they were coming into and participating in. So university campuses, as indicated in this quote by Peter Lin, a PhD student at University of Wisconsin, became really key sites for political formation and struggle, particularly because students were also, perpetrating and [00:12:00] becoming victims of surveillance by the ROC government, right?
So some students were being spied on and some students, other students were, doing the spying, were informing on their fellow students. Although the conditions of their migration served US interests and depended on the US' entangled relationship with Taiwan as the Republic of China, Taiwanese student activists fought to make Taiwanese visible and legible as a people subject to injustice and deserving of self-determination.
They created far reaching social networks that served as a lasting infrastructure for transpacific activism, and they participated and re and responded to Global Sino phone, inter Asian and internationalist politics. So one of the major points I make throughout the book is that although they went to the U.
S. under parameters that were strictly controlled by U. S. Cold War interests, neither the U. S. or the KMT could actually control the consequences of these flows. So an example of that, [00:13:00] so especially because they were being released into a world of comparatively more intellectual and political freedom, they immediately began to participate in creative acts of, political formation, reading, writing, and organizing.
And this is A Google map that shows over 70 overseas Taiwanese political publications in the collection at Sun Tzu University. it's a great collection. I always show this, to, especially to encourage graduate students to take advantage of this collection. But if you go to that Bitly link, you can browse around in there and read summaries in English and Chinese of, just general descriptions of, Taiwan.
Those publications, but this is just to show the volume of a political discourse that they were participating in and creating, relatively quickly after coming to the U. S. These are just a few of the things that they were reading and creating during that time. So many of them, of course, were very [00:14:00] interested in reading about Maoism and communism, because they had been forbidden from reading, that.
I was just talking to Laura about her, how I interviewed her advisor Lee and the famous chemist. And he said, that one of the things he was most excited about coming to the U. S. was reading books that previously you had to risk your life to read, right? Maoism, reading about Maoism and communism, that, that was a hot book, George Karis Formosa Betrayed, a lot of people wanted to read it as soon as they got here.
and that center, that center image is of Taiwan should die, which is a left pro independence publication that was published out of the U. S. by students during this time.
and they were able to find each other and organize themselves really quickly in social organizations and student organizations that also [00:15:00] facilitated political organizing. And so the Tongshuehui, the Taiwanese community associations and the, sorry, the Taiwanese student associations and also the community associations, the Tongshanhui, were very important for the ways that they organized themselves.
And I found through my interviews that they, that many in the community consciously used these as ways to. To organize politically. So the outermost layer would be casual participants and potlucks or softball tournaments. That was a big one, right? and then the event organizers, would sometimes would often be pro and more pro independence.
And then they would recruit people into that inner circle using these, informal, social networks to, talk with people and figure out what their politics were and build trust and also filter out spies. So that photograph on the left is actually a gathering in my parents backyard in 1979 [00:16:00] in San Diego, and I'm there on the bottom left with the bowl cut.
yeah, but 1979, a lot of the people in this organization who had found themselves again very quickly after moving to San Diego because of their, their, Their career, the kinds of careers that they're going into in their point, they would tend to cluster in similar places and be able to find each other pretty quickly.
But this group, many of them were also members of the foremost in Association of Human Rights, which was really key in publicizing what happened during the Kaohsiung incident. And, and advocating for an open trial for the dissidents to prevent them from being sentenced to death, but it was also at the same time just a backyard barbecue.
so that was a key finding in the book to write about how these very close knit organizations created the trust and the possibilities for people to organize themselves further.[00:17:00]
This is another example of how those kinds of networks worked. So this is Taiwan seeing voice of Taiwan that was created by a couple in New York, Morgan and song, and they also came as students from Taiwan and Morgan's on. They were active in the Taiwanese American Association of New York, and Morgan's on.
Was creating a way to share news within the Taiwanese American Association of New York, and he loved calling the weather phone number. So those of us who are older used to be able to call a phone number to get the weather forecast for the day, and he thought this was really ingenious. And so they set up a telephone service where you could call to get the latest community news, so initially it's intended just.
Oh, piano recitals or things of that sort, but they soon started reporting on political news happening outside, happening in Taiwan, and, [00:18:00] grew to have, dozens of affiliates all over the U S and in Japan and Europe. So you can see there, those are letters instructing people in Toronto and Paris, how to install the software.
non software. And it's all the technology to set up those recording those phone numbers in different places that people could call. And so they were making weekly news broadcasts and calling activists directly in Taiwan, and they were actually the first to report. after the gosh young incident happened, they had a direct call to shimming the and.
to his living room and they talked to Linda Arrigo, democracy activist, who was also Shimingo's wife, and you can hear explosions in the background and so on. and they became, often the first and only source of news, political news, coming out of Taiwan, to the point that even people in Taiwan were calling these numbers because in Taiwan they couldn't get, those news.
so that's [00:19:00] another example of the kind of creative organizing that happened through these networks. At the same time, and very importantly, the KMT's continuous surveillance and oppression of, usually relatively minor subjects, not necessarily the leaders of political groups, became very central to the identity and political formation of this generation.
People in interviews during that time, would often repeat these two Chinese proverbs, kill one, warn 100, kill the chicken to warn the monkey, to reference how, how, the KMT had a strategy to persecute, persecute people for minor or even non existent offenses to create an atmosphere of intimidation and terror overall.
you can see some of the things that were, that were said during that time period, right? The spies are the eyes of the KMT. Constant [00:20:00] surveillance is a way of life for some Taiwanese students studying in the U. S. We have the habit of watching what we do or read in public. That's the way we were raised.
And something that was really interesting to me as I was doing this research was how well known these cases and this kind of spying was at the time, and how well covered they were, and especially in the university and local newspapers during that time period, but they've been forgotten to general narratives of history, except by people who, you know, Except for by people who directly experienced them.
from 1964 to 1991, there are dozens of reported instances of KMT spying on Taiwanese students on 21 U. S. campuses, often by paid informants, fellow students from Taiwan, who are sarcastically referred to as professional students. And you can also, here's another interactive map that [00:21:00] I culled from, Winston Dong's edited volume, Taiwan Gate.
And this is a self published compilation of, newspaper articles and, and reports of spying incidents at all of these different places, including at Stanford. So if you want to know the specifics of that one, you can click on it and, there should be a short description of what happened at Stanford in that map.
So this, is a KMT informant form that was turned over to UC Berkeley's Daily Californian by a former spy. And so you can learn a lot from this, about who the KMT imagined to be their enemies and how they had, they systematically were keeping track of who was in the different Chinese and Taiwanese organizations and, and asking for, the situation between the enemy and us, right?
You can see that their enemies were both, communist bandits and, [00:22:00] and pro Taiwan independentists. and this, again, this form was widely reprinted in a lot of different publications during that time period. but I feel that it, I'm glad I was able to reprint it and in my book. so these reports were part of a widespread, a very pervasive, ROC government surveillance and infrastructure that was called the Tsai Hong or Rainbow Project.
And it was named this because Tsai Hong is a homonym for picking or stamping out the red, Tsai Hong, who the, who they referred to as, communist bandits. so being reported on could mean anything from intimidation, threats of injury or death and harassment of family in Taiwan to being blacklisted from returning.
and in my book, I write about three cases to that culminated in arrest and [00:23:00] imprisonment on returning to Taiwan and, one, that resulted in death, right? The case of Tseng and Tseng that I began my talk with. And so in each case, the particulars really shown light on the institutional transnational and political dynamics of their time, they show processes of political conscious form consciousness formation and alliance building in each place, as well as the shifting relationship between the US and Taiwan is the ROC.
As mediated by these educational institutions that were at the center of Cold War cultural diplomacy and economic and military objectives. So for example, at MIT in 1976, an alliance of Taiwanese students with members of a group, of the group Social Action Coordinating Committee held a teach in to expose a missile technology training program between MIT and an institute under the auspices of the [00:24:00] ROC Ministry of Defense.
A former student from Taiwan who was also a KMT naval officer attended the event with an ROC consulate official and took photos of the Taiwanese students in attendance. Members of the Formosa Club at MIT and a group called Concerned Taiwanese of Boston partnered with the Social Action Coordinating Committee to demand that the MIT administration stop the program and take a stand against surveillance of foreign students.
As in numerous other incidents during these decades, Taiwanese used local newspapers to articulate their own identities, in this case, together with anti authoritarian and anti war politics. this is a, this is a letter to the Boston Globe, Taiwanese Boston area resident. He says, your article showed some confusion about Taiwan.
It's the Nationalist Chinese, not native Taiwanese, who sent their military personnel to MIT for training. Thank you for listening. There's also the national Chinese who spied on the tiny student during the seminar in question. [00:25:00] Nationals Chinese are those who now control the islands of Taiwan under martial law.
they also claim to represent the whole of China to the local people, the Taiwanese that represent neither China nor Taiwan. The Taiwanese don't want any missiles and don't want to be kept under surveillance here or at home. so a lot of clarity about who they are, what they're asking for and expressing that to the American public.
In another incident at North Carolina State in 1983, two members of the Taiwanese Student Association were arrested and charged with illegal advertising for hanging posters around campus that accused the vice president of the Chinese Student Association of being a spy. And in a letter to the university administration, one of the two Pei Hongguo he, writes about the many, the, their political consciousness and the tactical goals behind their actions.
So he says, the students I represent have learned that unless we stand up united behind one another, historical tragedy will once again unfold [00:26:00] before us. So this is 90, 90, 1983, right after Tseng Wensung was murdered. In this spirit, the main reason we hung posters around campus was to alert newly arrived students to the necessity of being cautious and on guard at all times, not to mistakenly think that we too are to enjoy the freedoms of America, and then he goes on, we also intended to appeal to the fairness of American friends motivate them in the tradition of the American Revolution.
Be concerned about this basic violation of human rights here in your own country. So what interested me about this is that he's simultaneously calling out to the failures and appealing to the promises of American ideals. Asian American studies scholar, Ling Chi Wong, who himself was a Chinese student migrant, later theorized the state of existence as living under a structure of dual domination.
Subject to both U. S. Racism and KMT state oppression at once, and one's theorization was based in [00:27:00] part on his own personal experience of persecution by the KMT in the U. S. As well as his activism related to the case of R. O. C. National Henry Leo, an author who wrote an unfavorable biography of, John Jinkwa and who was assassinated on KMT orders in California.
Daily City. Yes, in his driveway. So in fact, for the KMT, such practices were in many ways a continuation of their extensive battles against the Chinese Communist Party for the hearts and minds of students on Chinese campuses in the 1930s and 1940s. So they had both been spying on and trying to infiltrate student groups to compete for their, for their hearts and minds, right?
and, interestingly, they had done a study, the KMT did a study after that time period and concluded that their spying [00:28:00] operations on Chinese campuses were a failure, but then they continued to do them anyway. So there's a long history there for both the KMT and the CCP. In the U. S. They were far from unique in their extensive surveillance and terrorization of their own nationals, in the U.
S. during this time period, and students became particular targets for surveillance among authoritarian ruled U. S. Allies. In addition to Taiwan, most notably. and the problem of regulating these until the intelligence agencies of Cold War allies, some of whom had been trained and established by the CIA itself to further U.
S. Interest was widely known and discussed at a national level in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. In 1978, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had produced a report on the activities [00:29:00] of friendly foreign intelligence service services in the U. S., focusing on the activities of the Korean CIA, which determined that collectively the Department of State, the FBI and the CIA had neither the will nor the capacity to surveil or mitigate the activities of such agents.
In 1981, Congress again took up the issue of spying, specifically with regard to Taiwan after Tsai Ing wen's death, with two extensive hearings in July and October of that year. None of these hearings and reports, however, resulted in systematic government agent, government action or change. As a result, As racialized and non U.
S. Nationals engaged in internal struggles against their own government, a U. S. L. A. Tony students were neither fully legible to nor protected by dominant rights based moral and political regimes. Chen's case, going back to the case of Chen Min sung, as it was [00:30:00] treated by the U. S. government and general public exemplified these dynamics.
As representative Jim Leach put it, two months after Chen died, remedies for violations of the civil rights of the foreign born appear limited and to a degree unknown. Allies and congressional advocates for more protections from such harm repeatedly evoked American freedom and democracy in contrast to foreign terror, positioning the U.
S. as a neutral and inherently morally good party. for example, you can see President Richard Syrett of Carnegie Mellon, who is a really tenacious public advocate for Chen, appealing to U. S. Congress as an entity that can bestow freedom to a group that has lost its freedom to terror. The immediate analysis of and remedies for this situation by members of Congress, however, [00:31:00] challenged, complicated this pose of neutrality and innocence.
Turning to one of the U. S. 's greatest forms of leverage, Stephen Solars, a Democrat from New York and the chairman of the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, proposed that U. S. arms shipments to Taiwan be made conditional on an end to spying. Solars action in response to Chen's murder was ultimately adopted in 1982 as an amendment to the U.
S. Arms Control Export Act of 1976. Known informally as the Solarz Amendment, it imposed a ban on arms sales to, quote, countries found to be engaged in a consistent pattern of intimidation or harassment directed against individuals in the United States, end quote. So indeed, Chen's case occurred during a time in which U.
S. arms sales became systematically, if not substantively, tied to human rights on a policy level. [00:32:00] The farcical situation on its face that was somehow naturalized by the coexistence of the U. S. 's self proclaimed ideological position as the moral arbiter of the world and its material position as the largest arms supplier of the world.
So this is a, this is a New York Times article about arms sales and the types of arms the U. S. is selling, a couple weeks after Chen's death or right before Chen's death. I can't read that far. so historian Calvin Chung Miao points to these moments of evidence of the, as evidence of the growing convergence between domestic and foreign repression during the early 1980s as the Reagan administration seemed to make exceptions for trans Pacific acts of domestic terrorism.
committed by authoritarian that is anti communist versus totalitarian, as in communist regimes, and this is a slippery Cold War distinction that was explicitly [00:33:00] calculated to support long term us interest. Some of you probably know this essay. So as diplomat and political scientist, Jean Kirkpatrick wrote in 1979, in an essay that would shape foreign policy in the Reagan era, as did Kirkpatrick herself,
who
Wendy Cheng: Reagan appointed as his foreign policy advisor and the U.
S. ambassador to the UN. should the U. S. censure or act against friendly authoritarian governments, at best we'll have lost access to friendly territory. At worst, the Soviets will gain a new base. And everywhere, our friends will have noted that the U. S. cannot be counted on in times of difficulty. And our enemies will have observed that American support provides no security against the forward march of history.
The provisions of the Solarz Amendment were subsequently severely tested in 1984 when author Henry Leo was assassinated by KMT affiliated gang operatives, and again in 1985 when the KMT arrested, [00:34:00] Yapin, the Southern California based publisher of a Chinese language newspaper. So again, according to Solars, these events were frightening examples, the long arm of Taiwan martial law tearing at the fabric of American democracy.
And then he says, the authorities on Taiwan are not content to destroy the basic liberties on the island. the KMT needs to be reminded, that the state of California is not a province of Taiwan. And so this kind of phrasing, perpetuated a fiction of clear distinction between an authoritarian Taiwan over there and a free and democratic U.
S. here by positioning the U. S. as a distant and benevolent provider of aid in the form of military arms. Rather than a key historical player in establishing and main in maintaining KMT rule on Taiwan, building the middle military, political and physical in infrastructure of post-war Taiwan, and enabling and shaping [00:35:00] Taiwan's post-war economic
US officials and allies. However, were not the only ones who spoke about Chen's case and its meanings. As I found throughout my research, Taiwanese in the US were never passive subjects of US law and discourse, but active agents in shaping meaning and action. Immediately after Chen's death, Taiwanese students were key in pointing out that the U.
S. government and institutions had long been aware of KMT surveillance and persecution of Taiwan nationals on U. S. soil and largely neglected to act. The Chicago headquartered Diasporic Activist Group Organization for the Support of the Democratic Movement of Taiwan Took a leading role in keeping Taiwanese in the U.
S. Informed about all the facts they could gather from both Taiwan and the U. S. Publishing extensive coverage of the case as well as an interview with Carnegie Mellon President Richard Seyert within days of Chen's death. So that special issue was published, [00:36:00] maybe 10 days after Sorry, only a week after Chen was murdered.
and then a few months later, they published a special issue dedicated to Chen's memory. and, said the following, where they offered summaries of many different spying cases that had happened across the U. S. and they read it. So I'm not just, I'll read it to you. You see the overextended tolerance.
they point out how the, universities have not taken concrete action. this overextended tolerance of the infringement upon academic freedom has now cost a precious human life. organization, OSDMT, while mourning his case, while mourning Chen used his case to point to larger structural issues rather than focusing solely on Chen as an individual.
and this, special issue had 28 articles, related to [00:37:00] KMT spying incidents and ended with an action plea for the release of Rita Yeh, who is a mainlander Taiwanese and a former University of Minnesota student, but recently been arrested and imprisoned in Taiwan, based in part on past reports of her activities in the U.
S. Taiwanese in the U. S. also organized and participated in powerful reformative actions. So for example, at this, memorial service and protest march for Chen that was held in Pittsburgh on July 18th, 1981, it drew mourners from all over the Northeast and Midwest, and many there wore paper bags over their heads to protect themselves from being identified.
Taiwanese in the U. S. had long been concealing their faces with bags or masks at campus community events or political gatherings, but doing so in the context of publicly mourning for Chen heightened the action's meanings and effect. As an [00:38:00] expression of mourning for Chen, this action, in the words of cultural studies scholar Crystal Parikh, made visible the limits of a domestic regime of liberal rights.
As well as the forms and ways of life that the American global nation has failed to recognize or refused to protect. Along similar lines, Chen's family members enacted what critical ethnic studies scholar Jinna Kim describes as insurgent melancholia. A public insistence on loss that will not be healed, which challenges the status quo and demands justice.
On October 6th, 1981, Chen's wife, Chen Shouzhen, testified in front of U. S. Congress and her testimony included directing Congress members attention to 39 photographs of Chen Wensheng's body that were taken during the first autopsy two days after his death. The catalog of injuries included 13 broken ribs, a fractured pelvic bone, and numerous internal [00:39:00] injuries.
She then walked Dears through wounds that seemed to evidence torture and not death from falling, as had been alleged by the KMT. Wounds on the shoulder and neck, a cluster of punctures on his right elbow, three parallel deep bruises on the back, highly suggestive of whipping. Some men winced, others just averted their eyes.
Repeating words from a statement she had released to the public the month before, she said, from the minute that I saw his body in the funeral parlor to which it had been taken by the police for custody, I knew that it was not an accident. There were just too many unexplainable external. The statement concluded, I hope that the worldwide response to one's death will help prevent such tyrannical acts in the future.
As one's wife, I feel that I have the right and obligation to learn the true cause of his death, and I intend to pursue every a avenue open to me. 10. Susan's insistence [00:40:00] on foregrounding the violence and lack of re resolution to her loss paralleled the actions of Chen's family in Taipei while publicly mourning and calling for justice.
His family refused to accept Chen's body for months as an act of protest against the KMT. Government's claim that Chen was not murdered. He was not buried until January of the following year. Their refusal was a powerful cultural way of registering protest. Subsequently, his father, Tseng Ting Mao, became an activist on behalf of his son.
On December 25th, 1983, he went to the front of the presidential building in Taipei, wearing a white vest inscribed with the words, Hunger Strike. Justice is not done. According to friends, the grieving father was surrounded by 30 military police officers who tried to force him into a military vehicle until he was persuaded to leave.
Undeterred, the elder Chan later distributed several thousand leaflets calling for a restoration of human rights in Taiwan. [00:41:00] And in 1984, he traveled extensively across the US to raise awareness of his son's death, giving 135 talks and wearing a placard that read, give me the truth. Give me my son. Sung Ting Ma's bodily protests, together with demands of justice, truth, and my son, resonate with the moral and political protests of parents whose children have been killed or disappeared by the state from Argentina to Korea.
Jin Ah Kim notes that the seemingly irrational demand for a loved one, a dead loved one, to be returned to life demands recognition of an incommensurable loss despite the impossibility of restitution.
Showing their ongoing investment in attempting to control Chen's historical legacy, the KMT continued to ban foundations from using Chen's name until 2000. And despite repeated calls for accountability and justice, it wasn't until 2018 that Taiwan's newly established Transitional Justice Commission, charged with [00:42:00] uncovering political repression in the martial law era, re examined Chen's case.
In May 2020, after reviewing freshly declassified files, the commission concluded that Chen was most likely murdered and that state security forces may have been involved. Still, no perpetrators have been held to account. Like Taiwan's white terror period in general, at a state level, the fatal harm inflicted on Chen and the terror endured by his family remain grudgingly acknowledged facts of history, proffered as information without accountability.
What Taiwanese political scientist, Unnaida, has described as a case with 10, 000 victims, but not a single perpetrator. These ongoing ambiguities and lack of resolution and closure, however, can also be an opening. On the one hand, reactions to Chen's death, particularly in the U. S., solidified a U. S. dominant, liberal, human rights centered narrative of history that erased the specific historical power relationships and geopolitics [00:43:00] that led to Chen's death.
His case shows the ways in which Taiwanese American history has been shaped and continues to be narrated by pro U. S. Cold War ideologies and their omissions. Taiwanese did not leave the reach of the KMT state in the U. S. A condition that was continually obscured by the U. S. State's participation in creating and perpetuating the myth of the Republic of China as free China, as well as his permit permission and complicity in allowing KMT agents, including student informers, to surveil and terrorize student migrants from Taiwan.
On the other hand, Chen's life and politics, considered in their full life and complexity, situate Chen like other diasporic Taiwanese of the time, as part of a broader global and diasporic political history. Chen's death also served as an important catalyst for diasporic activists mobilization against KMT terror.
Reconsidering Chen's life from a [00:44:00] multifaceted global history shaped by both the Cold War and martial law exposes not only the unresolved legacies of authoritarian rule in Taiwan, but also the U. S. state and the forms and ways of life it has failed to recognize or refused to protect. Through it all, Taiwanese migrant activists only sharpened their resistance and steadfastly refused to concede to multiple state violences or the terms by which others sought to define them.
Their spirit filled lives, as Chen wrote in a letter not long before he was murdered, persisted. I'll stop there and welcome questions and conversation. If you're interested in the book, it's on sale right now.
Kharis Templeman: All right. Thank you, Wendy. I, want to start with, A question about, university campuses in particular. you've you did some great comparative work looking at responses across [00:45:00] different universities. and in particular, the case of Richard Syrett as the president of Carnegie Mellon, when Chen Wenzhen was murdered.
You noted that he did actually speak out and was quite a tenacious advocate for investigation of this case. was there variation across U. S. university campuses and how they dealt with these kinds of accusations or, challenges on campus? and if so, what appears to be correlated with that variation?
Wendy Cheng: Yeah, so there's a lot of, so in terms of there's You know, but university administrations and then also state officials and what I found in the archives was that there was a lot of behind the scenes work that was happening to try to, to mitigate what would happen if they were arrested and charged.
but the, it wasn't really supported by [00:46:00] the laws. That could actually challenge what was happening. so you see the different kinds of arguments that and so I go into a lot of detail with three cases and three chapters of the book. chance case. I think. As you mentioned, Syrett was a really strong advocate for him.
There was another case that I wrote about that happened out of University of Hawaii's East West Center. That was the case of Tseng. That one was really interesting because, Patsy Meek, a congress member from Hawaii, was very, tried really hard to help him and, he was able to get a sentence of several years instead of, The feared life or death sentence that he would get for, [00:47:00] allegedly reading communist literature.
He also participated in protests against the Vietnamese economy, and then he allegedly wrote an article praising communist China. There is no support ever, no substantive evidence ever found for charges. And so the furthest University of Hawaii went what was to, besides advocating behind the scenes was that they had a policy that foreign students at University of Hawaii should feel like they could enjoy what they call the freedom of silence.
This was their actual policy that they should not feel like they had to participate in discourses that. East West Center especially, there was a lot of spying, there were many students coming from Asian countries, and there were also informers there. [00:48:00] mostly what I found was these kinds of behind the scenes efforts, and then different groups, a lot, in Chen's case, both in Japan and the U.
S. But they tended to be civic organizations.
Kharis Templeman: And do you see variation over time and the kind of the level of surveillance or the level of threats, the activities that students are faced with over the periods that you studied?
Wendy Cheng: I think.
what I looked at was the. There seemed to be a heightened attention in the 1960s when there were more students from Taiwan who were also interested in [00:49:00] Maoism. So if you had, so that was what people called being an even blacker blacklist, right? Something about being interested in Taiwan independence, which was something that some people in the U.
S. supported. an example of that was people who were interested in generally pro Taiwanese circles might get visits, their family members might get visits from government agents. I get letters from family members that were told to write to them and say, Hey, maybe you should be careful what you're doing there.
what is your son or your daughter is more light handed surveillance and intimidation. But for people who were more on the left, for example, I interviewed. This named hin who became one of the leaders of the ba, which [00:50:00] was, in their view standing up for Chinese sovereignty, but also against both Japanese and US militarism.
So for him, the consequences were more severe. His, his past perception confiscated his ROC passport and he ended up having to live as a stateless person and bus for. So they tended to punish that much more.
Kharis Templeman: Great. let's go ahead and open it up. We've got a lot of experts around the table. start with Francis.
Question: Hi, Professor Chen. Thank you so much for coming here today. I was reading Island X over the weekend and I think it was one of my favorite books of the year. I actually, this is a library copy, but I just bought with the discount code. So I would encourage everybody to do that. I want to pull in the thread that you were saying.
Sketching of U. S. complicity in this. and I'm curious to hear if the students ever [00:51:00] conceptualized or articulated a response that they wanted or a version of the U. S. that they wanted to see, not the Cold War U. S. But an imaginative possibility for something that would be better or represent sort of true justice or true freedom for them, detached from, as you were saying, the kind of liberal human rights discourse that was happening at the time.
Yeah. Or was that kind of imaginative transformative energy mostly focused on actions that could change in Taiwan or ways that governance could change in Taiwan
Wendy Cheng: for that question? Yeah, I think for most of the student activists, their main target was
most of them didn't have much of a critique of the except for those who. for[00:52:00]
example, I did bring up the example of Xiao Xin, who was a native or a local Taiwanese who, was, had broadly socialist politics, but he also tried to, serve as a bridge between pro independence and student elections. And for him, because he did have a critique of the U. S. and he was anti independence.
US militarism as well. he didn't feel like he, when his ROC passport was confiscated, he didn't feel like he could apply for asylum in the States. So that was one of the reasons he left the States. But I think the majority of that generation, their immediate goal, even though they might have very different politics in terms of what kind of Taiwan picture, their immediate goal was [00:53:00] to,
Question: How far back did you look at nationalist government and KMT suppression of students abroad? Because this is an activity that existed before the KMT relocated to Taiwan. it was what is most interesting about it is, for example, there was active suppression of Taiwanese or, rather Republican Chinese students on U.
S. campuses during World War II. but at the time, actually, U. S. campuses pushed back and there was a movement organized out of Harvard actually to make this a political issue between the two governments, but the larger cold war politics and the politics of the Chinese Civil War intervened and really changed the tenor of the entire discussion and took it off the map by the mid and late nineteen forties.
And so it's [00:54:00] this. This is not something that just started after 1949. Suddenly it was present. Almost from the moment Chinese students even arrived in late imperial times, actually, into the United States. So it's been an ongoing, activity pursued by a succession of quite different Chinese regimes.
Wendy Cheng: Yeah, I did not look that far back. And I would love to, get any reading recommendations you might have to bring that history. So the project originated as my, desire as both a scholar, but also someone whose parents were of this generation to, try to tell this, Some of the stories of that generation as they have, they're becoming elderly and so I, that was the starting point for it and then it led into all these other places.
Yeah, so the primary. [00:55:00] The first half of the book is much more focused on the structure of student migration, the kind of educational pathways they took and how that created these opportunities. These kind of unanticipated opportunities for political and surveillance just had to be part of it. It's so pervasive.
So I read some, a handful of things on the earlier history that I would love to.
Kharis Templeman: Yes, sir.
Oh, sorry, I missed you. Yeah, go ahead.
Question: My name is Edward Huang. I live in the East Bay. I am the one, the original observation of all this, what he's saying. I came to the state from Taiwan in 1960, and I came to Kansas University, and I observed everything. But before I get to that, to your [00:56:00] comment is that I think it's different.
Before the Second World War, before the end of the war, there's no Taiwan issue. It's China, U. S., and Japan. And then after the end of the war, then Taiwanese start to come to Thai, to U. S. Before that, not hardly any Taiwanese come to U. S. So that, then there is thing, KMT start to terrorize Taiwanese student.
That's where, that is the issue of this book. It's, start just very shortly. I look at your map here. You're showing that, harassment, East Coast, a lot of them. Couple point in, West Coast or something. for listening. And I don't remember anything in the Kansas, but I like maybe, the Kansas, Manhattan, Kansas.
Let's see, is it, is that Kansas then? I'm not sure. That's not, that point may not be in Kansas. But anyhow, I want to say, Manhattan, Kansas State University is the state. [00:57:00] I think maybe before 1960 and maybe from 1958, I don't know, it is the center, they call it, it's the West Point of Taiwanese Independence.
It's all Taiwanese. the student one with Taiwan independence. Start from there. They grow from there. And then they affect Wisconsin. Where's your book? So talk about a fun teaming, something like that. And then Samuel Cho and into other place. So anyhow, I think it's a very strong point is in, in, Manhattan.
And I was in Kansas. So we were about two hours away. We have, got Taiwanese Association, Manhattan and KU, we could talk to each other, but most of the people who came, when you left, at least for me, when you left Taiwan, I hate Chinese because of two to eight incident, my father's [00:58:00] and their friends.
Talk told me shut your mouth. Don't talk about if you talk about party of Chris. I think you're out. You cannot even go out of this country. So we're so quiet. But in my mind. I really hate Chinese because they look at Taiwanese as second generation, class generation. So when we came to the U. S., then, wow, everything opened up.
Everything, you can see the literature or something. In Taiwan, anything against Taiwan, those are banned. You don't see it in the bookstore. So it opened up, but yet our heart is that we need to be, we know all the KMT agency around. We need to be very quiet, but we don't like them. But we'll talk about and discuss about the student in private, but few those, brave people and interest like those people in Kansas state, they start to form town is independent group and start to campaign and draw, [00:59:00] bring up town is a identification, so, that's how we start.
Wendy Cheng: Thank you for that. Yes, Kansas State, very important place in this history, as well as University of Wisconsin and other universities in the Midwest. And I found some really interesting reasons why that happened like that. One was because Tanshan, like local Taiwanese, were tending to go to these big Midwestern public research universities that were offering competitive.
T. A. Ships and R. A. Ships and, resident tuition and things like that. And because of that class difference, right? More of the mainlander Taiwanese who are going to the U. S. Tended to come from more elite family backgrounds, right? So they were going to More elite universities in California East Coast.
So in the Midwest, you have these clusters of native or local Taiwanese who are finding each other and talking to each other playing softball with each other, so [01:00:00] that one of the big softball tournaments. was connecting 10 universities across the Midwest every year and was one of the key places that had this kind of concentric circle structure.
It was an opportunity for people to socialize and get together with other Taiwanese, but also to organize politically. Yeah, so the Midwest is a very important place in Taiwanese.
Kharis Templeman: Yeah, I should add. There's a lot on Kansas State in the book. Actually, I was that jumped out at me when I was reading it.
Wendy Cheng: Interviewed several Kansas State students.
Kharis Templeman: Okay. Yes.
Question: Presentation. Thank you. My name is Frank Lav and I had the chance to study in Taiwan during this period and then work at AIT. So you can see from the Taiwan perspective, the impact of martial law. My question on the surveillance in the U. S. Is how was this a universal attribute of Taiwan political [01:01:00] organizations on campuses or was there a threshold of behavior?
Meaning was there any organization that could exist and was so anodyne or moderate in its belief that it was deemed not to be worthy of threshold? Or was it a blanket policy that any Taiwan grouping of any degree, merited surveillance.
Wendy Cheng: Yeah, so I think it was pretty systematic, and so what you could see from that report form is that they're just reporting on, just like taking the temperature of that place, so they wouldn't have to have done something necessarily.
They're just saying, how many people are in the Chinese Student Association, how many people are in the Taiwanese Student
Kharis Templeman: Association,
Wendy Cheng: what's their political position, what's his, the leaders. And so on. And so it was very systematic. and so the RFC consulates, would be the hubs at each place.
And then from [01:02:00] out from there, they would be in contact with the student informers. Sometimes working at the East Asian libraries right where they could keep track of what people were checking out. So it was a very systematic network that was, that had records about any place where there was a significant number
Question: of students come forward. So now that they're in retirement, or maybe they have a pang of guilt, have any of them publicized or talked about their experiences?
Wendy Cheng: The only one that I know of, others might know, is Ma Ying Chou, who is very proud of being a professional student, because he felt that he was doing his patriotic duty by informing on his fellow students.
Otherwise, I was personally not able to speak to anyone or I don't know anybody else who has spoken up. Hi,[01:03:00]
Question: Professor Chang, my name is Andrew and I'm actually a student of Professor Templeman's class on like Taiwan. And so Professor Templeman was able to bring in a member from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office who was a student at National Taiwan University during the time martial law was lifted.
And when we asked him how he felt about martial law being lifted, he mentioned that he was too young and didn't have the time to think about it, which I thought was really surprising. I didn't know what that, so I was wondering what your thoughts of, if any, of how like Taiwanese students in Taiwan thought about martial law and was it different than those in the U.
S.?
Wendy Cheng: Yeah, I did. I only interviewed people who came to the US. I know that kind of informing what's happening is in Taiwan. So
I don't know if anybody else has more on that. [01:04:00] I do think there was a higher level of suppression in Taiwan, and there are many famous. political organizations that came out of, specific departments at national diversity, and then they would publish a bunch of political articles, and then they would get shut down, and the leaders would go to jail, right?
So there was, there were those kinds of things happening throughout the martial law period in Taiwan that would then have an effect on how students in the U. S. were responding to that, and so on. I don't know the student experience.
Question: Laura. I was struck by how late the 1991 date was. I always thought this was something my advisors generation dealt with, but it was over, but I was in graduate school in 1991. So that really. And I, my question is that really an end date or is that just when they stopped [01:05:00] tracking it? How, when did it really end and has it really ended?
Wendy Cheng: that I don't know. I haven't heard. People naming it an issue,
but I also have a
record keeping on that side.
Kharis Templeman: the UCLA case you mentioned, can you talk about that a little bit? So
Wendy Cheng: I don't remember the details of that, but that was the latest one. And so there were not, I think that was the only one in there that happened after the end of martial
Kharis Templeman: law.
Wendy Cheng: That's an interesting research project for someone.
Kharis Templeman: So in Taiwan, the transition democracy, one of the big moments in the transition was in 1992. I've got the date right when, they actually removed [01:06:00] the, so there were, personnel files on everyone that included a record of your political loyalty to the party. And those were used in promotions in the civil service.
And that was, officially at least removed, as a required qualification in, I believe, 1992. And so that would be the kind of information that is fed in from your time abroad, if you're a student studying at Berkeley, say, and then you're coming back to work for the KMT, that, that would probably be in that file and they would look at it in order to know whether you could be promoted in the civil service.
Question: Thanks so much for the talk. in today's world. We read a lot about spying on US campuses and elsewhere by people on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party of the People's Republic of China. I'm wondering what you see the implications of your research as being for that issue in the here and now.
Wendy Cheng: I guess one [01:07:00] thing that could be helpful is that is for students who are caught up in that or people who are trying to help to intervene in that to know that there's a long history there. even. longer than my book traces. And to look for different examples of how that's treated. I think also the, yeah, I think the what I'm trying to draw attention to is that position of neutrality.
And, but it means how difficult it is for students who's, Governments are presented in a certain way, for the things that are happening to them.
So in the case of Taiwanese students, [01:08:00] that idea of the ROC being free China was so difficult to surmount that I think it was very difficult for the general public, public to grasp
Kharis Templeman: it
Wendy Cheng: in a way that could create a broader base of support to push universities to take stronger positions against China.
So, I think what I'm trying to do there is just to, to show how difficult it was for them. And in the case now there might be, it's a question of what kind of organizing needs
Question: to
Wendy Cheng: happen for enough people to care about that to be able to pressure universities. At whatever level they can, right?
Maybe people can't do anything at a state level, right? But universities can have different policies about how they treat that. So some university presidents were trying to do that. And some of the cases, maybe this gets back to Carlos's earlier, question, like the university of Wisconsin president after Huang Qiming was [01:09:00] arrested and imprisoned in Taiwan.
They were sending cables to the ROC government saying that University of Wisconsin would have to question whether we can accept more students from Taiwan. If, this is the possibility, if you don't respect freedom of expression on the campus. So that could be an example of how a university could intervene.
Even if at the state or governmental level, that would be a harder.
Kharis Templeman: Other questions. we've got. Yeah. So
Question: it's on. It is on. Yeah. My name is John Shea and from Hayward East Bay. I do had a question in the last 20 to 20 years since 19 to 2004 in Taiwan. This is more and more people started about the status of Taiwan. But in your research today, your [01:10:00] report, I haven't heard anything you mentioned about it.
You talk about the KMT's, regime in Taiwan. And then it sounds to me that you personally accept that the, KMT has a summit deal of Taiwan, but actually it's not. Because let's look back to the, 1945, the, general order number one, and they say three territory surrender to a junk has said, China, except the, men to go.
And also the, Taiwan and also the, North Vietnam, but let's. Take a look today, the China Mao Zedong took it over, not never the military occupation never on the sovereignty. That's what I tried to say, and lost. Vietnam, same thing, who took it over. Now, it's. Communist of Vietnam. Okay, Taiwan. [01:11:00] At that time, we don't have such kind of the leader to lead us against the military occupation.
You probably record that the, Hugo Grotius published the book, The Law of War in Taiwan. the law of war and peace in 1625. He said that military occupation doesn't transfer the sovereignty. I think a lot of people in Taiwan today, they study that, even Ho Chi Minh, China as the Mike Pompeo said Taiwan has never been a part of China.
That's what I believe. I personally, but unfortunately, I've been to this, research for a long time for many years. no, that I haven't heard any, scholars come here to talk about it. And I really hope that you can talk about it too [01:12:00] because you are the young generation compared to us, you're much younger, you can focus in this area.
Wendy Cheng: You asked me this question before in Phoenix right now that you're.
Question: That's you.
Wendy Cheng: Okay. Maybe this is a question for cars.
Kharis Templeman: Taiwan status.
Wendy Cheng: are you going to invite younger scholars?
Kharis Templeman: I certainly think younger scholars should be involved and looking at this issue. the fundamental challenge is that there's, there's a very powerful People's Republic of China that has a very clear position on that is diverges from the view of most Taiwanese.
and, the PRC is not going to go quietly into the night if that position is recognized by the international community. And debating over the finer points of Taiwan status and international law, I think is a side [01:13:00] quest, and ignores the, core issue, which is the divide between Taiwan and the PRC over that question.
the ability of international law to decide this, I think, is limited in a world where we've got a very powerful People's Republic of China, that insists that the rest of the world conform to their view until and unless that changes. The international law question is secondary. That would be my answer to that.
we've got another question in the back. This gentleman. Yeah.
Question: Thank you. I wanted to come back to the question asked earlier. bring us back to today. We're obviously we're talking about the PRC, it's a different set of circumstances, perhaps, but in some ways, it's exactly the same set of circumstances.
Kharis Templeman: Yeah.
Question: And I wanted to push the question since I'm not a faculty member here, nor an administrator, I am an alum, and I assume we have [01:14:00] plenty of faculty members or administrators here. If my question is impolitic, forgive me, but I wanted to ask how well informed are faculty members here? And is the administration here and at other universities around the U.
S. of, some of the issues that you have written about in another era, that may well be reemerging today. If they're not well enough informed, what do we do about it? And, Possibly as someone based in D. C., what is the role of the U. S. government in helping universities become better informed about these things, if that is needed?
Wendy Cheng: That's a great question. I could say from this, things that could be learned from the time period I write about is that Taiwanese students during that time period were very vocal about sharing these experiences, even if they had to be anonymous, right? And the, [01:15:00] campus and university newspapers were a really important space where that was.
So actually there's a really strong historical, I also did interviews, but, of people, sharing with their campus communities. I don't know if that's happening. Now, that would be a first step, right? Just to raise awareness because I think conversations that are happening only behind closed doors, only looking at individual cases are only going to, there needs to be a much broader what's happening and a willingness for people who are suffering under that to share with colleagues.
What's happening to them, I think that was really powerful for timing students not only to share within their communities, but with broader public so that some something could happen. [01:16:00] So I don't know.
Kharis Templeman: We wouldn't expect you to know the state on Stanford's campus.
Wendy Cheng: Yes, I'm not.
Kharis Templeman: Glenn, can I call on you.
Do you have thoughts on this. This is Glenn's part of Glenn's core research here.
Question: I'm really glad you raised that. the short answer is there are conversations around these topics, but we have a tremendous amount of work to do. And I think the fundamental issue goes to the subject matter of this talk involved to Nations that had fundamentally asymmetric power relationships.
And so United States universities and the United States were in a much stronger and dominant position vis a vis Taiwan in this time did not feel threatened by Taiwan in the way. that they do today. U. S. universities have much stronger relationships with universities in the PRC. They're much more hesitant to [01:17:00] jeopardize those.
They have much larger numbers of students from the PRC on their campuses, which both increases the sort of threat surface and risk exposure, but also makes it much more complicated for them to manage. and there are real issues with regard to, being aware of what is happening in spaces that are largely dominated by the Chinese language, in which university administrators seldom have any visibility over that.
And increasingly in today's world, it's also happening in encrypted spaces on WeChat groups that are invisible. Unless you happen to be part of those communities, and so the problem is alive and well, and if not burning brightly, it's a question of whether people want to see and what they want to do about it.
And that's where we have a lot of work to do. But there are plenty of people who are engaged on this. And the U. S. government is actually briefing some universities on it as well.
Kharis Templeman: Wendy, since you are at Scripps [01:18:00] College, have these issues come up there among the Claremont McKenna sisters?
Wendy Cheng: not in that particular way, because I don't think we have the numbers.
Chinese international students that larger universities have, right. So I don't know as much of it, as they are. I know during the pandemic, there were questions about, Zoom and Zoom security and recording and, students who might be vulnerable because they, where they were located, when they were at home, but other than that, we haven't seen that much issue.
Question: This is a data point, but I think it's important. Earlier this year in January, there was a trial in Boston that was the first prosecution involving transnational repression on a U. S. University campus by [01:19:00] indirectly related to the P. R. C. State in which a student Of PRC origin in the United States, put up posters around the time of the a four white paper protests in China against the covid restrictions.
in Boston, calling for democracy in China. And one of her classmates, also from the PRC, began attacking your Vituperatively in private WeChat channels, but also reported her on a Ministry of State Security tip line on the web back in China, so that her family got visits from the Ministry of State Security and their lives became very uncomfortable.
She reported this to the FBI, and the FBI took the case, the Department of Justice prosecuted it, and it resulted in a conviction. And the student, the perpetrator was sentenced to several months of prison time and then followed by deportation. So this is a turning [01:20:00] point case in the United States, how far to raise consciousness and to indicate that people who do this, by all accounts, it was a sort of vigilante action on the case of a particular student, but a student who had been educated to believe that you should report activity, By students that challenged the government and that deviated from political orthodoxy on DSO.
there's a sense in which the U. S. Government is taking a greater interest in this, in which it's trying to signal also that people cannot act with impunity. Francis, did you
Kharis Templeman: have a two finger?
Question: Yeah, just to add to Glenn's comments and not to hijack the island X talk to be about contemporary PRC transnational repression, wanted to Put a couple things on the table.
One is I think there's a another geography that we should introduce into the conversation, and that is Hong Kong and that Hong Kong students are feeling this pressure to especially in the wake of the passage of the national security law in Hong Kong, which is explicitly transnational [01:21:00] and other national security related actions.
And I'll just note to bring it back to Island X and when you do read the book and when, not if there's some really interesting dynamics, About the relationships between Taiwanese student organizations, Hong Kong, East student organizations, pro KMT students and pro independent students. and then if folks are interested in reading some very well done research on the issue of transnational repression and the contemporary moment, I would just point you to reports by human rights watch.
They have a great academic freedom report. and there was a report that just came out yesterday from an amnesty international with the rather memorable title. On my campus. I am afraid. So just a quick plug for those things as well.
Kharis Templeman: Any other questions or comments? If not, I'll go ahead and wrap it up here.
Please join me in thanking Wendy Chang for a great [01:22:00] presentation.
