Shih Ming-teh, defiant activist for a democratic Taiwan, dies at the age of 83

Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong advocate of democracy in Taiwan who spent more than two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president of his former party, died on January 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island's capital.

The cause was complications from surgery to remove a liver tumor, said his wife, Chia-chiun Chen Shih.

Mr Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally suppressed by police and is now seen as a twist point in Taiwan's journey from authoritarianism to democracy. When he was on trial for the confrontation, he said smiled defiantly at the camerasalthough its original teeth had been shattered under police torture years earlier, and provided a seminal argument for Taiwan's independence from China, an idea banned under the reigns of Chiang Kai-shek and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.

“I spent 25 years in prison and faced the possibility of the death penalty twice, but each time I got out I immediately threw myself back into the whole effort to overthrow the Chiang family dictatorship.” throw,” Mr. Shih said in an interview with The New York Times in 2022. “I am someone who never had a childhood.”

He began a life of protest when he was still a teenager. He was first accused of illegal political activities at the age of 21. His two stints in prison – including, he calculated, 13 years in solitary confinement – ​​only seemed to harden his resistance.

He was honored as a hero when Taiwan emerged as a democracy in the 1990s and became leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, the island's first major opposition party of the new era. But in 2006 he led mass protests against Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan's Democratic Progressive president, who had once supported Mr. Shih.

Mr Shih died two days after Taiwan held its eighth direct democratic vote for a president. After his death, many Taiwanese, including some who had feuded with him, praised his role in the democratization of Taiwan. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, who previously had her own problems with him, visited him in hospital the day before he died.

Mr. Shih “devoted himself to the democracy movement in authoritarian times and was a pioneer for Taiwanese democracy and human rights, with far-reaching influence,” Ms. Tsai wrote in a tribute to Mr Shih.

Shi Ming-teh was born on January 15, 1941 in Kaohsiung, a port city in southern Taiwan. He was the fourth of six children Shih Kuo-tsui, a doctor, and Shih Chen Ying, who oversaw the house. The family prospered, but Mr. Shih's childhood was shadowed by war and repression, and Mr. Shih said those memories shaped him throughout his life.

Taiwan became embroiled in the war between Japan, which had occupied the island as a colony for over half a century, and advancing American forces. Mr. Shih remembered that American bombers attack Kaohsiung. After Japan's defeat, Chinese nationalist forces took control of Taiwan and ruthlessly eradicated the opposition. Mr Shih recalled how nationalist forces had shot students at Kaohsiung Train Station.

He later said that his early years set him on his path as a rebel against the waves of colonialists who had ruled Taiwan for centuries; he considered the Nationalists who fled China and were defeated by Mao Zedong's communist forces in 1949 as the youngest in their ranks.

“Taiwan is not part of China,” Mr. Shih wrote in a book published in 2021. “On the contrary, China is nothing more than a part of Taiwan's history.”

By the time Mr. Shih was in high school, the Nationalists had turned Taiwan into a fortress against Mao's China, and he and some classmates formed an amateur secret society dedicated to winning Taiwan's independence. He enrolled in a military academy and told his mother that he only did so to learn how to organize an armed uprising against the nationalists.

Mrs. Shih was an officer on Little Kinmen – a Nationalist-occupied island dangerously close to the Chinese coast – when police officers came to arrest him in 1962. Investigators had uncovered its role in the independence society and seemed convinced the group was part of a much larger conspiracy. They beat Mr. Shih as evidence, and his teeth were crushed or later pulled out.

Mr. Shih was surprised when the judge sentenced him to life in prison on sedition charges, he said, and not the death penalty he had expected. Released early in 1977, he returned to opposition activities despite the risk of being found violating parole conditions and being sent back to prison.

“I could see that he was working like a man on fire to challenge the authoritarian rule.” Linda Gail Arrigosaid an American scholar and pro-democracy campaigner in Taiwan, who was married to Mr Shih from 1978 to 1995, in a recent interview with the Formosa Files podcast. “He expected to die in prison – by execution.”

By the late 1970s, the nationalists' hold on Taiwanese society began to loosen and opposition groups began to spread. Mr. Shih and other activists founded a magazine, “Formosa,” as a vehicle for their cause. It set up offices across Taiwan, recruited supporters and held rallies.

The United States' decision to transfer diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 emboldened opposition, and Taiwan's Nationalist government came under pressure, leading to the Kaohsiung clash in December that year, in which hundreds of police officers march, organized by Mr. Shih and others.

Many of his colleagues were quickly arrested, but Mr. Shih evaded police for almost a month before he was captured and tried along with seven others. An arrest photo showed his jaw covered in bandages, the result of a hasty attempt at plastic surgery to alter his appearance.

The trial drew even more attention to their calls for democracy, especially as the government – ​​eager to prove its point to the Taiwanese public and the rest of the world – allowed journalists and international observers into the courtroom. The tall and thin Mr. Shih smiled for the cameras, his hands in his pockets, in what he said was an attempt to convey careless confidence.

He used the trial to attack the Nationalist government's position that Taiwan was part of China. Instead, he argued, Taiwan had been separated from China for decades and had become effectively independent, even if Taiwan's rulers would not accept that reality. That argument would enter the island's political mainstream.

“Today these claims seem nothing unusual, but at the time they were a breakthrough,” Mr. Shih wrote in an account of the trial published in 2021. “My smile and my political counterattack were the reason the tyrants didn't do that. dare to execute me.”

Sentenced to another life sentence for sedition, he continued his resistance from prison even as society outside began to open up. He held hunger strikes to protest the killings of opposition figures and their relatives and was force-fed about 3,000 times between 1985 and 1990, his former aide Huang Hui-chun said in an interview.

In 1987, Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui offered to release the so-called Kaohsiung Incident prisoners, but Mr. Shih refused. He would only leave prison, he said, if he was fully exonerated. That move came in 1990, and Mr. Shih returned to a Taiwanese society in ferment.

His long struggle for democracy gave him great influence, and he became a member of parliament and chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, which emerged as the central opposition to the nationalists. But after decades of captivity, Mr. Shih did not always feel at home in Taiwan's new politics.

When Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian won Taiwan's presidential election in 2000, many supporters of Taiwan's self-rule were thrilled by his surprise victory. But Mr. Shih was more wary. He resigned from the party to emphasize his political independence and later turned against Mr. Chen, angered by mounting allegations of corruption.

In 2006, Mr. Shih organized the “Red Shirt” movement, which drew hundreds of thousands of people to protests outside the presidential palace in Taipei calling for Mr. Chen's removal from office. (Mr. Chen resigned in 2008 and was later convicted on corruption charges. He was issued out of prison in 2015 on medical parole.)

Mr. Shih seemed to relish being in another political battle, and he mingled with the crowds, sometimes wearing a shirt that declared him a “commander in chief” of the movement.

“If I look young, it's because I've been frozen for 25 years,” he told The New York Times at the time, referring to his years in prison.

But his newfound fame alienated some friends who aligned themselves with the Democratic Progressive Party and were unhappy that he had worked with Nationalist Party politicians. Mr. Shih argued that he had tried to protect democracy and that effort had been more important than partisan ties.

He married Chia-chiun Chen Shih, his second wife, in 1996. He is also survived by their two daughters, Mino Shih and Jasmine Shih. Mr Shih also had two daughters from a previous relationship.

In his later years, Mr. Shih promoted proposals for finding common ground between China and Taiwan, ideas that some of his former friends considered naive. He published three volumes recounting his trials and decades of imprisonment. Madam Chen Shih said he was haunted by those times.

“He told me that during the day he knew how to let go of his hatred, but at night those things would come back to him in his dreams,” she said. “All that left a deep impression on him.”