Behind Human Rights

Publish Date: 06/01/2001 
Story Type: SOCIETY; HUMAN RIGHTS; PROFILES 
Byline: KELLY HER

PHOTOS BY HUANG CHUNG-HSIN

Human rights remained a taboo subject in Taiwan for the decades when the island was subject to martial law. Now, however, the government is cooperating with civic groups to take some more positive steps. In which areas is Taiwan doing well, and perhaps not so well? And what factors are likely to influence progress?

Writer and human rights activist Bo Yang is perhaps one of Taiwan's most prominent former political prisoners. He was writing essays on the island's social problems as early as the 1960s, but it was his 1967 translation of a comic strip in the China Daily News that angered then President Chiang Kai-shek. Bo was charged with treason and sentenced to twenty-four years in prison. He spent eight years on Green Island before being released. 

Born Kuo Yi-tung in China's Henan Province in 1920, Bo graduated from the National Northeastern University in Shenyang before fleeing to Taiwan to escape the civil war in the late 1940s. He initially found work as a teacher and later took up a post at the Anti-Communist Youth League. 

Upon his release from prison, Bo continued to write articles critical of Chinese society, culminating with the publication of The Ugly Chinaman in 1985, which was translated into English in 1992. The writer has become an outspoken advocate of human rights, and is now the honorary chairman of the Human Rights Education Foundation which was launched in 1994. He also pushed for the establishment of the human rights monument on Green Island. A plaque there bears his inscription, "In that era, how many mothers spent long nights crying for their children who were locked up on Green Island?" 

Despite personal hardships, Bo Yang is upbeat about Taiwan's human rights progress. "I'm very lucky to be able to witness freedom and democracy in Taiwan," he says. "How many people were shot to death or died in lunatic asylums during the dark days? They didn't live to see this moment. The very thought of it makes everything that we now enjoy more precious."