Mapping the History of Taiwan 's Student movements
A documentary series now airing on Public Television Service looks at the history of campus activism

By Yu Sen-lun
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Mar 13, 2005 ,Page 17

Taipei Times _ Mapping the History of Taiwan's Student movements By Yu Sen-lun

More than a decade after the March Student Movement (三月學運), where have the former student leaders who led thousands of college students in a two-week, pro-democracy sit-in at Chiang Kai -shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂) gone? Are they still fighting for the idealism of that time? And is there a students movement to speak of now in Taiwan ?

With these questions in min d, directors Yang Yi-tse (楊一哲) and Sung Ying-ying (宋穎鶯) began to seek out people former student-movement leaders, such as former Government Information Office director Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍), director of Council of Hakka Affairs Luo Wen-chia (羅文嘉) and legislator Lee Wen-chung (李文忠), asking them to recount their experience of those heady days. The interviews, conducted over three and a half years and with help from seven filmmakers, have been compiled into an eight-hour documentary retrospective on the history of protest movements in Taiwan .

Titled the Stormy Times -- Taiwan's Student Movements (狂飆的年代), episodes are currently playing on PTS every Tuesday.

"It was like cooking a pot of soup with stones -- a long process where you have to keep adding water and ingredients," Yang said.

A history of protests

He originally had planned to make a film about the March Student Movement featuring only Lin Chia-lung, Luo Wen-chia and Lee Wen-chung, but later broadened the time-span to almost a century, starting in the Japanese colonial period and extending to last year's post-presidential-election demonstrations.

In 1910, a group of Taiwanese students studying in Japan started a publication titled Taiwan Youth (台灣青年) in which they wrote about anti-feudalism and rebellion against Japanese colonialist rule in Taiwan. The founders of the magazine went on in 1921 to establish the Taiwan Cultural Association (台灣文化協會), which became one of the main organizations working against Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan. Their actions are now viewed as the fountainhead of the Taiwanese student movement.

According to Yang Tu (楊渡), a senior journalist and author of two books about Taiwan's student movements, the period from 1910 to 1950 saw student movements leaning heavily to the left politically, especially in the wake of the 228 incident and an incident on April 6, 1949, when 10 demonstrating students were shot by police. Protests at the time were aimed primarily against the KMT and identified with socialist or communist ideas.

"Students groups here were seeking allies with mainland Chinese student groups. Campus upheavals spread like wildfire in Taiwan and China from 1947 to 1949," Yang said at the premiere of the documentary series this week.

But the sprouting leftist movement was silenced by the so-called "white terror" beginning in 1950 when the ruling regime sought to consolidate its power by eradicating left-leaning dissidents through imprisonment and executions.

One of the directors of the series, Chang Chao-wei (張釗維), calls this period "the vanishing left eye."

It wasn't until 1970, when a movement arose to defend claims to the Tiaoyutai island group, did Taiwan 's campuses resume political activism. Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), then a student at Harvard Law School, was one of the active students in the movement.

Originally a patriotic movement to back Taiwan 's claim to the islands and denounce Japan 's assumption of sovereignty over the uninhabited rocks in the ocean, the movement also gave voice to calls for freedom of speech and democratic reform in Taiwan .

By the 1980s, student clubs at National Taiwan University began to organize demonstrations led by Lin Chia-lung and Lee Wen-chung advocating free speech on campus.

These student clubs eventually established a united student movement with different universities cul min ating in the March Student Movement, which was the largest student rally in Taiwan in 20 years. In March 1990, two college students began a demonstration to protest the National Assembly, which at that time was filled with representatives who held their posts for life. As more students joined, the protest expanded to 5,000 students and 100 professors, lasting 16 days and eventually forced a series of reforms in the legislature and National Assembly.

"We wanted to recapture the passion and spirit of those student actions and re-position those incidents in the history of Taiwan ," said producer Yang.

"Many of the past incidents have been buried in each individual's memories. I am very glad to see them being discussed anew and contextualized historically," said philosophy scholar Chen Ku-ying (陳鼓應), who in 1971 lost his job along with 12 other professors at National Taiwan University for criticizing the government in class.

New questions

The retrospective series also stirred new questions among the former activists that speak to Taiwan 's current political situation.

"Back then, we advocated the principles of science and democracy. But society now is still filled with superstition and selfish ideas," said Lin Hsiao-hsin (林孝信), founder of Science Monthly (科學月刊) and a former activist in the Tiaoyutai movement.

Filmmaker Chang, a participant in the March Student Movement, took the Korean student movements of the 1980s as a counterexample to Taiwan 's student-led democracy movements. The former student leaders in Korea have now become the leading members of that country's government and are the key persons behind its flourishing cultural and creative industries, he said.

"But looking at Taiwan , did the March Student Movement really liberate anything? Have we really experienced a revolution?" he said.

Looking at more recent times, only sporadic student protests have taken place, and not always in support of the lofty principles of the former pro-democracy movement. Three years ago, students at National Chiao-tung University protested to demand better food and service in the campus cafeteria. Two years ago, National Cheng-kung University students gathered to protest the arrests of students for illegally downloading MP3 files.

Most recently, about 100 students protested the result of last year's presidential election and what they called the suspicious circumstances of the election-eve assassination attempt on the president and vice president. But the action lost steam after 10 days.

The apparent lack of political consciousness among Taiwan's youth has given rise to the expression "Strawberry Generation" (草莓族) to identify young people born in the 1980s who are viewed as detached from politics and unfamiliar with hardship.

"Young people tend to have little concern about bigger issues in society and politics. And very few wish to run for government posts," said professor Lee Chia-tung (李家同).

The perceived indifference to politics of the Strawberry Generation worries many of the former student leaders, who say it reflects a problem in Taiwan 's democraticization.

"It is not young people's fault. It's us adults who did not take the responsibility to teach them to be unselfish and to help the others," said Yang Tsu-chun (楊祖珺), a student-movement leader in the 1970s.

According to Yang and Chang, the series aims to inspire reflection instead of romanticizing past student movements.

"I no longer fantasize about the next large-scale social or cultural liberation movement. But I do hope that anyone who sees the films series can look to the future by reviewing the past, not just for Taiwan, but for his or her personal life," Chang said.

`Stormy Times - Taiwan 's Student Movements' is now showing on the Public Television Service channel at 10pm every Tuesday.

Taipei Times _
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/03/13/200324614

Aboriginal singer Kimbo has been playing the blues since the 1970s, giving a voice to Taiwan's disenfranchised and dispossessed. His first album, made after more than 30 years in the business, is now set for release

By Yu Sen-lun
STAFF REPORTER
Sunday, Mar 27, 2005, Page 18

In the 1970s Kimbo, or Tuko Mackaruwane in his native Puyuma language, was known as Taiwan's Bob Dylan, blending Taiwanese Aboriginal sounds into his poetry and folk music.

Named Hu Defu (胡德夫) in Chinese, he has been known as a singer since his teenage years, but his new and first solo album release has been delayed by 40 years.

Produced by Cheng Chieh-ren (鄭捷任), who also produced for the award-winning Aboriginal singer Samingad (紀曉君), with the new Aboriginal music label Ignite Fire (野火樂集), As Time Flashes (匆匆) is a retrospective album on Kimbo's 40-year singing career.

"It's hard not to be touched by Hu's natural yet powerful voice," said Lee Kun-yao (李焜耀), president of BenQ Electronics and a fan of Hu's since the 1970s when they were both students at National Taiwan University's Foreign Language Department.

Back then, Kimbo was Taiwan's highest paid folk singer, earning up to NT$25,000 a month -- at a time when the monthly salary of a Cabinet minister was NT$7,000 per month.

"Maybe my songs were too heavy for the market or to package for commercial record companies. They were written not for publishing purposes in the first place," Kimbo said in a cafe in Taipei, a cigarette constantly in one hand.

Kimbo said he is not a prolific songwriter. He writes about one song a year, each one written, he said, after the pain in his body, heart and soul had reached a cresting point.

"If a song cannot move me to an unbearable degree, I would not publish the song," he said.

The blues he feels is from his 30-year involvement in Taiwan's political, social and Aboriginal movements. In all of these upheavals over the years, Kimbo's role hasn't been that merely of the protest singer, but rather he has been the frontman and organizer of many demonstrations.

In the 1980s Kimbo was a member of the tangwai (黨外) dissident movement, which was the predecessor of the DPP. He served as the head of the tangwai association's Minority Committee, which later became the fountainhead of Taiwan's Aboriginal movement.

Hu was among the first to talk about reclaiming land from Han Chinese-owned businesses and from the government, preserving Aboriginal names and raising the issue of Aboriginal girls being forced into prostitution.

Even in 1999, a decade after the peak of Taiwan's political and social movements, when the 921 earthquake devastated 90 percent of Aboriginal villages in central Taiwan, Kimbo emerged again, leading clashes with police over unfair treatment of Aboriginal villagers.

When Lien Chan (連戰), vice president and premier at that time, visited the damaged villages, Kimbo led a group to block Lien's way, confronting him in person to demand more relief work.　

All these actions and sentiments have been accumulated and encapsulated in his songs.

The Longest Road (最最遙遠的路), written in 1983, is a song about Aborigines moving to the city to study or make a living. Why (為什麼), was written in 1984 to commemorate a dozen Aborigines killed in a mine explosion that year.

Darter, Clouded Leopard, The Basin Of Taipei (飛魚, 雲豹, 台北盆地) voices the indignation of the Tao tribe on Orchid Island, where the government built a nuclear waste storage site in the mid-1980s against the locals' wishes.

Kimbo also wrote folk songs, such as The Boy On The Buffalo's Back (牛背上的小孩, 1974) and Da Wu Mountain -- My Mountain Ma-Ma (大武山美麗的媽媽, 1985), to display his longing for his home in Taitung County.

Kimbo's singing talent took root in his high school years at Taipei's Tam-kang High School, a religious school set up by the missionary George Leslie Mackay. Students were trained to sing psalms and choral songs every morning and to play rugby every afternoon.

"I remember all the boys who loved to sing formed quartets and competed with each other every morning," Kimbo said.

He recalled a nun named Ms Taylor, who introduced Scottish folk songs and American Southern spirituals to the boys.

I was naturally drawn to the rhythm of blues and spirituals and was gradually influenced by these vocal styles," Kimbo said.

"Little by little, I began to understand the content of spirituals and found lots of similarities with Taiwanese Aboriginal music. The repeating patterns of the blues are very similar to some music styles in Puyuma Paiwan music.

"The lyrics of Aboriginal folk music, like spirituals, tell about suffering. But I feel there is more praise to nature in Taiwanese Aboriginal music, instead of just telling about the pain," Kimbo said.

Romanticism and spontaneity seem to always drive Kimbo, making him a pioneer in many other businesses outside his folk music and social-movement activism.

He and friends opened Taiwan's first teppanyaki restaurant in Taipei in 1970. He was also once a partner in Taiwan's leading toy business. But these businesses were all flash-in-the-pan affairs, like many of the short-lived protest campaigns.

His free-spirited style demonstrates Kimbo's talent, but it is also sometimes a source of trouble for his producers. For instance, he never sings the same lyrics twice. Two years ago, it took him two hours to shoot a 20-second music video clip because he could not sing the same lyrics in front of the camera.

"I've sung that song tens of thousands of times. None of the times have I sung the same lyrics," he said.

Now Kimbo has decided to redirect his focus toward music, his one passion.

"I decided that this time I would lay down everything else and start to treat my music, especially Aboriginal music, with respect," Kimbo said.

As Time Flashes is meant to be a summing-up of his past musical career so that he can begin pursuing his new musical passions.

"I want to systematically explore the heritage of Aboriginal music, especially the abundant use in Aboriginal music of words like ho hai yan which don't actually have any meaning. I want to explore the beauty of these words and blend their usage into my own music,"

He will also work more closely with young Aboriginal musicians and music producers to help develop new talent.

"There are so many beautiful voices among the younger generation Aboriginal musicians. Unlike me. Only my heart still rocks," Kimbo said with a laugh.

（＊Taipei Times_http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/03/27/2003248017 ）