The year was
right -- 1984--and the words certainly had an Orwellian sound to them.
It was last October when a select group of men gathered at the Armed
Services Officers’ Club in Taipei to discuss the scourge of “thought
pollution” and the “rampant flood of illegal opinion.” “Cultural
warfare must be expanded and waged more effectively,” declared one
government official. Those with “opinions that slander the head of
state,” vowed another senior officer, “must be severely punished.” The
participants were high-ranking figures in the government of Taiwan, and
they were apparently plotting a task worthy of Orwell’s Thought Police:
smothering Taiwan’s political opposition by a dose of censorship.
The minutes of that meeting, leaked from within the Taipei government,
soon appeared in three dissident magazines. That tended to support the
contention of Taiwan’s beleaguered opposition that the ruling party,
the Kuomintang (KMT), has stepped up its campaign against the dissident
press. And actions since have left even less doubt.
According to the International Committee for Human Rights in Taiwan, a
monitoring organization based in the Netherlands, acts of government
censorship are dramatically on the rise.
The group listed 187 incidents last year, compared to an annual average
of 30 prior to 1984. In addition, Taiwan’s League of Opposition, an
outlawed anticensorship group, has already documented 207 acts of
confiscation, banning and suspension of magazines this year. For their
part, KMT officials deny any orchestrated crackdown; the increased acts
of censorship, they insist, are simply a statistical outgrowth of the
mushrooming number of publications recently venturing more open
criticism of the government. “A lot of people say we are too strict in
dealing with freedom of speech,” says Lee Mo-ping, head of the
publication affairs department. “I think we are too lenient.”
Taiwan’s constitution guarantees freedom of speech, but that right has
often been a casualty of Taiwan’s perpetual state of martial law, which
permits censorship of material that “confuses public opinion and
affects the morale of the public and the armed forces.” The sole judge
of what might confuse public opinion or affect morale in Taiwan is, of
course, the government.
The KMT began loosening some of its restraints on the press five years
ago. The result was a great leap forward in the number of independent
magazines--and Taiwan’s emboldened opposition took full advantage of
their long leash. Dissident publications became increasingly harsh in
the tenor and substance of their criticisms, and they found no shortage
of incidents to write about. None was more embarrassing to the Taipei
government than the murder late last year of Chinese-American political
writer Henry Liu. In April Taiwan’s former military intelligence chief
was found guilty of instigating the crime, and two of his deputies were
convicted of being accessories to the murder.
The KMT’s tolerance snapped. Beginning in March, agents of the Taiwan
Garrison Command, the chief martial-law agency, raided the offices of
such dissident publications as Torch and Progress--often without search
warrants--and confiscated more than 20,000 magazines. To prevent
distribution of publications that escape such confiscation, the command
now posts hundreds of agents at newsstands and bookstores to identify
buyers as well as intimidate dealers from selling.
Additional “legal” pressure comes in the form of libel suits that often
proceed directly from charges to sentencing with barely a semblance of
due process. Defendants have been denied the right to present evidence
or witnesses, and the damage settlements-such as the $75,000 fine
slapped on the magazine Voice of Thunder Weekly in June--are
excessively punitive by Taiwan standards.
Shabby Practices: But even critics of the KMT’s tactics acknowledge
that Taiwan’s dissident press is often guilty of shabby journalistic
practices. Antonio Chiang, editor of the opposition Asian Weekly,
concedes that many publications are run by people completely
inexperienced in the rudiments of reporting. But he and others note
that they are denied the normal process of newsgathering. Dissident
publications are not permitted to have reporters. The publications have
devised their own tactics of survival, however. In order to skirt
frequent suspensions, editors purchase a handful of licenses, which
they call “spare tires,” with different names that can be used
interchangeably for the same magazine. The publications also glean
information from reporters in the mainstream press who are frustrated
by establishment newspapers that refuse to print anything that remotely
smacks of criticisms of the government.
Still, the KMT crackdown has left much of the opposition press
reeling--and groping in the dark for some way of striking back. Chiang,
for example, has seen his Asian Weekly--considered one of the most
reliable of dissident magazines--banned for five weeks straight, and he
says he has no idea why. “I have asked (the government),” he says. “But
we don’t even know who’s responsible. Everyone is faceless.”
In terms of numbers, dissident newspapers and magazines are hardly a
threat to the KMT. At the beginning of the year, opposition
publications accounted for a mere 14 of Taiwan’s 247 political
magazines; now, only seven have survived. Still, the battle goes on.
Already the mavericks have organized demonstrations and are planning to
petition the government. “I don’t expect much,” says Chiang. “But I
plan to fight to the end.”
