George Kerr on why he left his Vice Consul position

In Chapter 7 of Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr writes about two reports he sent to the US Embassy in Nanking:

Late in the year I sent along to the Embassy and the Department a secret coded supplementary report upon prominent personalities about town, and certain evident conflicts within the Taipei Government. My report evoked a telegraphic request for more detail, but this was construed to be a rebuke; I had committed an unpardonable bureaucratic sin by raising an issue which called attention to ourselves. 

My second semi-annual report for 1946 on social, political and economic conditions was endorsed, coded, and forwarded through Nanking, to Washington. It carried a warning that tensions within Formosa were near the breaking point, a violent crisis might be upon us at any time. The document was given a number and entered into our secret record book.

Later on, he writes that when he was in Nanking writing a "State paper" to be translated and given to Chiang Kai-shek, he made use of the December report "which had been endorsed and forwarded to the Embassy. But in the Embassy files I found also a brief, secret, unnumbered follow-up dispatch from Taipei which said in effect that the Embassy should not take my December predictions of impending crisis too seriously."

In an October 27, 1974 letter, Kerr expands more on this note and gives also some more context for why he left his position as Vice Consul. It is well-known that Consul Ralph Blake and Kerr did not see eye to eye on how to respond to the crisis in Taiwan. It's also commonly known that the KMT didn't want Kerr to stay on in his position. Hsiao-ting Lin,for instance, writes, "Chiang Kai-shek's officials acridly blamed George Kerr ... for instigating the islanders' rebellion against the Chinese rule, leading to Kerr's disgraceful recall." Kerr suggests, however, that it was he who made the final decision to leave:

In late 1946 I prepared a long Memorandum predicting a crisis at any moment, naming names and citing incidents. It was endorsed by Blake and forwarded to Nanking and Washington. But then Blake flew off to Nanking, leaving me in charge, where he urged that I be pulled out. When the crisis did occur, and I went to Nanking to report to Stuart, I was given access to the files in order to prepare the Memorandum which appears—severely censored to remove all references to Formosan appeals to the USA—in the White Paper. In the files I found an unnumbered Memo from Blake to the Embassy, sent along immediately after the endorsed December Memo, in which he strongly denigrated my report (which he had endorsed). When Stuart and Butterworth asked me to return to Formosa, I drew their attention to it, and on resigning the Service, pointed out that no man of integrity would serve under Blake under those circumstances. Blake knew that if he needed it, he could summon up that unnumbered Memo, but since it was not entered into our register of numbered, secret despatches, it could remain lost forever. (emphasis added)

Kerr suggests that despite his conflict with Blake, Ambassador Stuart and Counselor to the Embassy Butterworth still wanted Kerr to stay on in Taiwan.

(The memo Kerr refers to here appears to be different from the memo Blake attached to a later report, cited by Richard Bush, in which he criticizes Kerr's style of writing.)

Source: Letter to Jonathan Mirsky, available in the Okinawa Prefectural Archives.

The DPP's role in relaxing restrictions on cross-strait travel in 1987

I happened to watch the following video today and was interested to hear how the Democratic Progressive Party was involved in the 1987 movement to allow Mainlanders to return to visit family there. Most accounts that I've read, like that of Murray Rubinstein, depict the opening up of opportunities to visit family simply as one of Chiang Ching-kuo's reforms. Other accounts, like that of Shelley Rigger, emphasize the effects of that policy change.* 

This video depicts in more detail the process that veterans went through to gain the right to visit relatives in China. It describes the veterans' agonizing desire to know what happened to their families. As DPP official Yu Shyi-kun, who was a Taiwan provincial assemblyman at the time, says, "In addition to not being able to see family members, they couldn't even write letters to their relatives. So no one knew if they were dead or alive. Can you think of anything crueler than this?" And as veteran Liu Minguo says, "Soldiers have to listen to orders. ... In the military, if you're ordered not to do something, you can't do it. If they say it's white, it's white; if they say it's black, it's black." But according to the video, these soldiers (who became veterans) had to internalize their pain because they knew it was illegal even to express these feelings. (I've written before about how for some soldiers, such pain led to suicide and even murder.) 

According to the video, members of the dangwai ("Outside-the-(KMT)-party," which later became the DPP) decided to help these veterans try to contact their family by allowing them to send letters via their magazine, Progress magazine (前進周刊), and through the mailbox of then-dangwai legislator Xu Guotai. The program says that they helped send 300-400 letters.

After the veterans formed a "Association for the Promotion of Mainlanders to Return Home to Visit Relatives" (外省人返鄉探親促進會) and took to the streets to ask the KMT government to let them visit their families in China, the DPP voted to support the Mainlanders' attempts to return home. DPP politicians persistently asked KMT officials to allow the veterans to go home. But the KMT, most importantly President Chiang Ching-kuo, was afraid that such a policy would play into the PRC's plot to reunify under the Communists.

The veterans began to take to the streets, carrying signs, handing out leaflets, and organizing speeches to let Taiwanese know about their pain and to pressure the KMT to change its mind. On June 28, 1986, a meeting of the Association held in Taipei attracted over 20,000 supporters and officials from the KMT's intelligence bureau. The veterans' tearful songs about going home to find their mothers moved the audience to tears. At this point, according to the video, the veterans' tears and song were finally heard by Chiang Ching-kuo. In October of 1987, the Executive Yuan declared that Mainlanders with family in China could return to visit their relatives.

In the video, Yu Shyi-kun speculates that because the DPP was promoting this policy, Chiang Ching-kuo became concerned that if the KMT didn't pay attention to the veterans' request, it would lose the support of some of its most loyal followers. Tamkang University professor Chang Wu-Ueh (張五岳) agrees that the support of the DPP was vital to publicizing this issue and pressuring the KMT to change its policy.

------------

* I did find a footnote in this 1999 article by Yu-Shan Wu that cites a 1998 book by Kuo Cheng-liang (郭正亮), 民進黨轉型之痛 (The DPP's Ordeal of Transformation, or as Wu translates it, The DPP's Agony of Transition). According to Wu, Kuo argues that "there was a period in the late 1980s of far-sighted pragmatism in the DPP's attitude toward the Chinese mainland. At this time, the DPP exposed the rigidities of the KMT's mainland policy, championed open communications with the mainland, and hoped that by unilaterally recognizing the PRC they would encourage Beijing to respect Taiwan's sovereignty" (568 n. 6).

[Update, 5/2/24: Lost that video, but here's another video that discusses this topic in part]

Three new books in the former native speaker's library

Haven't written anything here for a few months. Unfortunately, I don't have time to write much now, either. But I got three books in the mail today that I had ordered during the University of Hawai'i Press's big sale last month, and I wanted to share the joy:

• The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan, ed. David K. Jordan, Andrew D. Morris, and Marc L. Moskowitz (U of Hawai'i P, 2004)
• Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan, ed. Yuko Kikuchi (U or Hawai'i P, 2007)
• The Peasant Movement and Land Reform in Taiwan, 1924-1951, by Shih-shan Henry Tsai (MerwinAsia, 2015)

The first two books cost only $5 each (and the second is a richly illustrated glossy-papered hardback). The third cost $45, but a total of $55 for three academic books is not too bad in my ... ummm... book.

I've got some other books to work on first (after I finish grading, some writing projects, and any other things that come up...), but I hope to dip into them soon!