When a government threatens outspoken citizens with long prison sentences for “sedition” if they challenge policies, its diminished moral compass is a problem for the historian, making it difficult to keep events in perspective, as he looks on in horror. When the same government enforces its grip with torture, assassinations and “disappearances,” the task becomes more problematic still. This much can certainly be said about the “White terror” period in Taiwan in the post-war decades. Only now, as the more fortunate survivors advance into old age, can some of the most traumatic first-hand experiences be collected and verified, even as politicians on all sides tend increasingly to let the sleeping dogs of the past lie.

In the absence of any “truth and reconciliation” projects or restorative justice, with retired torturers free on the streets of Taipei, and crucial archives blocked or destroyed, history must depend heavily on survivors' accounts, oral and written, fragmentary as they may be. We can only speculate how many surviving victims were silenced into psychosis, with families broken and professions destroyed. However, the human spirit being as it is, now and again narratives appear from those who did not merely survive, but went on publicly to articulate their experience and fight back through the political system.

One such is Annette Lu (Lu Hsiu-lien). Her recent “semi-autobiography” written in collaboration with Ashley Esarey is an extraordinary record of late 20th-century Taiwan history seen through the eyes of one of its victims, throwing valuable light on the atrocities that the present governing party might prefer forgotten.

Annette Lu, known nowadays more for her march through the political institutions to become vice-president under Chen Shui-bian, reveals a series of life-episodes in which she suffered and took on not only the weight of “White terror” oppression, but also the male chauvinism of both Kuomintang and entrenched Chinese tradition. Armed with impeccable legal qualifications from Illinois and later Harvard, she abandoned American academia to return to Taipei in 1986 and threw herself into the feminist movement at a time when all women's associations were considered potentially “seditious.” (The very few that were licensed, proved to be tea-party meetings for KMT wives.) As for her American education, the only way she could have obtained a passport for study abroad was formally to join the Kuomintang, an act of bad faith she would later regret, and which would lose her sympathizers. Lu's account of the methods used to crush early feminist movements is a telling indictment. She was several times betrayed by “friends” who proved to be working for the Investigation Bureau, cafés were spied on, and in one particularly odious episode, a phone-in helpline for distressed women was sabotaged.

It was not long before she moved on to even more dangerous politics, joining the “dangwai” groups that were asserting a programme of both democratic reform and, perilously, Taiwan independence (Tai du). She describes in detail the almost surreal level of surveillance she and her comrades suffered in this period, subject to death-threats and abuse, hardly able to move without the plain-clothed agents and blacked-out cars of the Investigation Bureau in attendance.

This was to lead inevitably to violence, notoriously in the Kaohsiung Incident of December 1979 as a result of which the dangwai was virtually decapitated, with eight leaders and associates of the provocative Formosa Magazine going on trial, Annette Lu among them. She was sentenced to 12 years in prison and suspension of civil rights for a further ten. Nevertheless, the authorities under the mildly reformist Chiang Ching-kuo did at least allow a public trial, rather than the closed military tribunals of previous years, and with the press no longer as supine as hitherto, the result was a world-wide outcry from Amnesty International to the US Senate. Annette was defended by her brother, an experienced trial lawyer, but to no avail. (Much later it would emerge that the Kaohsiung events were in part a calculated government provocation.)

The account of her prison experience forms one of the most moving parts of Annette's book. Although, unlike other prisoners, she was not violently tortured, she was often starved, threatened with death and humiliated. When her mother died, as she believes, in shock over her daughter's imprisonment, she was not allowed out to attend the funeral. Worst of all, following an earlier bout of thyroid cancer, and dreading its recurrence, she was deprived of proper medical care. She reveals an interesting episode when Ma Ying-jeou, then presidential secretary, intervened to arrange a visit from her one-time Harvard law professor Jerome Cohen, campaigning on her behalf. As the reviewer can confirm, Ma, in his earlier career, was fond of boasting of the “Harvard influence” to meetings of its alumni chapter in Taipei. We must hope that this gesture to his adversary Lu was not simply out of law-school solidarity.

Annette was remarkably generous towards her jailors, making friends with some, even in some cases winning their admiration. Finally released, in 1985 she began her ascent into the political élite via election to the chief executive of Taoyuan county, a task she threw herself into in an admirably “hands-on” manner. In this role she did not shrink from facing corrupt obstruction, or from gruesome tasks, such as when in February 1998 she rushed to be at the China Airlines A-300 crash-site, among the dislocated bodies and distraught relatives, when other officials gave press conferences at a safe distance.

When invited to stand as vice-presidential running-mate with Chen Shui-bian in 2000, it came as something of a surprise. There followed a vigorous election campaign culminating in the notorious assassination attempt on 19 March 2000, just before polling day, when she and Chen escaped with minor injuries, amidst the wildest of conspiracy theories. She would have been all too aware of the murder of her predecessor, Liu Bang-yiu, shot dead with colleagues in the Taoyuan county offices she was about to inherit, a crime still unsolved. The rest is democratic history: the DPP victory in 2000, and a challenging period in office.

The volume closes with a third-person Epilogue reviewing the successes and pitfalls of the 2000–2008 Chen–Lu government. Admirably, this makes no attempt to disguise the internal conflicts and corruption which played a large part in the subsequent decline of the DPP, Chen's incarceration, and its present frustration on the electoral scene.

If this volume has a fault it is that the authors often leave the reader somewhat adrift in the time-scale of events. Yet the narrative is told with disarming fluency and a rapidity that makes for breathless reading. As her rival, the later presidential candidate Tsai Ying-wen remarked when in London, “to be anything in the DPP, one needs to have been in prison.” Annette Lu fulfilled this requirement with poise and distinction, and an energy that many politicians would envy. Now, retired from the limelight and devoted to “green” matters, with Ashley Esarey's able cooperation, she has given us a volume that combines historical record with a moving narrative of survival and dedication to the long-suffering people of Taiwan.