Bruce Jacobs, an important figure in Taiwan history both as a principal and a scholar, has produced a useful, informative and long-awaited book on the political watershed events in Taiwan between late 1979 and mid-1980, along with the unexpected and unwanted roles he ended up playing in them. It is essential reading for anyone interested in democratization and the struggle for respect for human rights in modern Taiwan history.
This is really two books in one, and as such the volume comes across in some ways as collectanea of related topics in Taiwanese history. The first part, to page 110, covers the political background of the Kaohsiung Incident of 10 December 1979 (a protest march for respect for human rights in Kaohsiung that turned violent after KMT agents-provocateurs incited and provoked violence between marchers and KMT security personnel) and the widely publicized trials of its principals in both military and civilian courts. It also covers the Lin family murders of 28 February 1980, in which a knife-wielding assassin brutally murdered the mother and twin daughters (born in February 1974) of Lin I-hsiung, a distinguished dissident politician and democratization pioneer in Taiwan. (Today the case remains unsolved and the culprit unidentified.)
Ironically, the account of the Lin family murders given in David Kaplan's 1992 book Fires of the Dragon (New York: Atheneum, pp. 304–06) is more circumstantial, and informative than Jacobs's (pp. 40–42). Puzzlingly, Jacobs fails to note that the murders took place on the highly significant and symbolic date of 28 February 1980, the 33rd anniversary of the February 28 Incident that began on 28 February 1947 and resulted in the deaths of at least 20,000 unarmed Taiwanese people. He also ignores Kaplan's reasonably plausible contention that a rogue pro-KMT group in Taiwan called the Iron Blood Patriots may have been involved in the murders.
Jacobs does not use the published memoirs of Reverend Kao Chun-ming, General Secretary (not “Executive Secretary,” as incorrectly given on page 98) of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan from 1970 to 1989. His coverage (pp. 98–102) of Kao's trial, which relies exclusively on newspaper transcripts of the trial proceedings, would have been enriched by Kao's memoirs, especially his decision to give safe harbour to Shih Ming-teh, regardless of the consequences.
Jacobs mentions Linda Gail Arrigo (1949–) only once, tangentially. Arrigo was one of the main principals involved in organizing the human rights march in Kaohsiung on 10 December 1979, but Jacobs does not list Arrigo among the wives and relatives of defendants in the Kaohsiung Incident trial who went on to make important contributions to Taiwan's democratization (pp. 108–09) Given Arrigo's extensive publication in both English and Chinese on her long and distinguished participation in the struggle for human rights and democracy in Taiwan, these omissions are unfortunate.
The most important portion of the book is part two, “Memoirs of a Foreign Big Beard” (pp. 1134–64). In it we learn the sordid particulars of the KMT's campaign of lies and deception about a foreigner with a big beard somehow being involved in the Lin family murders. Jacobs (who did have a beard at the time) and Parks Coble had knocked at the door of the Lin family residence a little before 6:00 pm and several hours after the murders, and journalists took pictures of this event. In a likely attempt to deflect attention away from the possible complicity of rogue KMT elements in the murders, in the ensuing Orwellian media circus (the KMT controlled all news media at the time) a story was concocted about the possible involvement of a big-bearded foreigner in the murders. The story soon assumed a life of its own, independent of any relevant facts and logic. Jacobs's account (chapter six; pp. 113–147) mentions nine-year-old Lin Huan-chün (the one child of Lin I-hsiung who survived the brutal murders despite being stabbed repeatedly; now known in English as Judy Lin Linton) but inexplicably makes no use of her eyewitness account of the murders (https://tw.forumosa.com/t/1979-lin-family-murders-a-first-hand-account/50007; accessed 10 July 2018) and her firm denial that any bearded person, foreigner or otherwise, was involved (http://www.taiwandc.org/judylinton-Mar2008.htm; accessed 9 July 2018.) The KMT detained Jacobs for several months under “police protection” but was unable to frame him for the murders, and in the spring of 1980 Jacobs was permitted to return to Australia. He was then blacklisted and not permitted to return to Taiwan until the early 1990s, when democratization on the island had begun.
Jacobs chronicles his return to Taiwan in the 1990s as a latter-day Rip Van Winkle and how, even then, he was still hounded and tagged by security services but never arrested. He concludes his book with an account of the President Ma Ying-jeou administration's perfunctory, gutless and fruitless reinvestigation of the Lin family murders in 2009 and then concludes that KMT security agencies may well have been involved in the murders in one of two likely scenarios: either the grousing of a higher-up in a security agency against Lin I-hsiung being misinterpreted by lower-level personnel as an order to commit the murders, or else a security agency actually planning and committing the murders. In either scenario, Jacobs speculates, the murderers were quite possibly “permanently silenced,” (p. 163) something he leaves unexplained. There is, however, another possibility, one that my mainlander / KMT in-laws in Taiwan still believe today: the murders were committed in cooperation with organized crime, and the terrifying spectre of grizzly reprisals for informing on the perpetrator(s) still intimidates people into silence.
A few small errors and shortcomings crop up in the book. Jacobs fails to note that Hsieh Chang-ting (Xie Changting) is known as Frank Hsieh in English (p. 107), and errors of punctuation and usage, while minimal, are present. But these are minor flaws in an important book and first-hand account. This engaging, informative and reasonably priced volume belongs in the libraries of Taiwan history scholars and buffs and in the libraries of serious academic institutions throughout the world.
