Qiu Shijie
School of History and Cultural Heritage, Xiamen University
Distinguished senior members of the international social movement community, esteemed colleagues, greetings.
Today, I would like to share a report that draws on historical experiences from Taiwan. Specifically, I aim to explore how the leftist movement in Taiwan, China sought to engage in dialogue with progressive movements in Northeast and Southeast Asia following the democratization movement and the lifting of martial law in the late 1980s. My presentation will focus particularly on the achievements and setbacks of left-wing activists in the Taiwan region of China, in relation to the broader question: How can China engage in dialogue with global progressive forces? Indeed, in any movement, the lessons drawn from moments of failure can often prove more instructive than those derived from success. These hard-earned experiences form the core of my report today.
Let us begin with the emergence of what may be called the third cycle of Taiwan’s leftist movement. The pro-democracy movement outside the ruling party during the 1970s and 1980s laid essential groundwork for this third cycle. The second cycle—namely, underground communist activities that took place in the five years following Taiwan’s retrocession to China—was brutally suppressed during the White Terror of the 1950s. The first cycle dates back to the 1920s, when the Taiwan Communist Party, the New Culture Association, and the Farmers' Association were active. It was not until the democratic resurgence of the 1980s that Taiwan’s leftists were once again able to reemerge as a political force, marking the start of the third cycle. A key milestone during this period was the founding of the Labor Party in 1989.
The Labor Party and its predecessor organizations—including the China Tide Association (夏潮联合会), the Alliance for the Reunification of China (中国统一联盟), and the Taiwan Area Association for Political Victims Mutual Aid (台湾地区政治受难人互助会)—formed the only political faction within the pro-democracy movement outside the ruling party that upheld both socialism and the principle of Chinese unification. These forces may collectively be referred to as the "Socialist Unification Faction." Since the 1980s, other individual leftist activists and factions in Taiwan have deliberately avoided engagement with the question of national unification. Thus, using the term “Socialist Unification Faction” to refer to the leftist forces represented by the Labor Party helps illustrate the trajectory of Taiwan’s leftist movement during its third cycle. It is important to emphasize that while the socialist unification camp was not identical to the broader Taiwan leftist movement in the 1980s, it nevertheless constituted its mainstream. The most compelling evidence is that the Labor Party brought together nearly all the remaining leftist activists from both the first and second cycles during the 1980s. Its membership included elder veterans of the Taiwan Communist Party from the 1920s, victims of the White Terror who had participated in post-war underground communist activities, and young leaders who emerged from Taiwan’s labor movement in the 1980s. By absorbing major activists from all three cycles of Taiwan’s leftist movements, the Labor Party gained a breadth of perspective rarely found among other individual leftists or factions. Notably, it pursued solidarity among leftist activists across geographic boundaries—international solidarity—a concept encapsulated in the Japanese loanword “国際連帯” (kokusai rentai), which was directly adopted by the Socialist Unification Faction. Between 1990 and 2010, the Labor Party actively participated in and promoted two major progressive solidarity movements in East Asia. The first was the Asia-Wide Campaign (AWC) against U.S.-Japanese domination and aggression in Asia, a movement named in Chinese by writer Chen Yingzhen (陈映真) as 全亚洲反对美日帝国主义侵略与宰制运动. The second was an academic initiative: the symposium “The Cold War and State Terrorism in East Asia.” Japanese leftist activists played a key intermediary role in both initiatives. As a result, the Japanese term “国際連帯” (kokusai rentai) naturally entered the lexicon of Taiwan’s leftist movement. While terms such as 'international solidarity' are also in use, ' 国際連帯 ' has come to occupy a distinctive place in the leftist discourse of China's Taiwan region.
The core participants in the AWC movement were the so-called New Leftists of the 1960s and 1970s based in the Philippines, South Korea, and Japan. In the Philippines, the key force was BAYAN (Bagong Alyansang Makabayan), led by José María Sison. In Japan, the primary actor was the Communist League. The former functioned as the nationalist united front organization of the Communist Party of the Philippines, while the latter referred to the youth faction that split from the Japanese Communist Party in the late 1950s and led the Anpo Struggle in the 1960s. Notable intellectuals such as Hiromatsu Wataru, Masahiko Aoki, and Karatani Kojin were early members of the Communist League. The faction of the Communist League most involved in the AWC was the one that remained after continuous splits since the 1960s and placed the greatest emphasis on international solidarity. This faction began building ties with the Philippines in the 1990s, eventually forming an alliance. It then extended its outreach to South Korea and Taiwan, gradually establishing a relatively loose communication network. The AWC was officially established in 1995, with Taiwan participating under the name Taiwan, China. Due to the absence of representatives from mainland China, Taiwan remained the sole representative from China within the AWC movement.
At its core, the AWC was an anti-imperialist initiative, but its agenda also reflected region-specific concerns. Taking the demands raised by the Taiwan delegation as an example: first, we advocated that the ultimate goal of Taiwan’s anti-imperialist movement is the reunification of China. This was a demand that we hoped other AWC participants across the region would fully understand and respect, particularly regarding China’s historical experience. Second, we highlighted the Baodiao Movement (保钓运动), or Defend the Diaoyu Islands Movement. Third, we opposed U.S. military bases. Since the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Taiwan following the normalization of diplomatic relations between China and the United States in 1979, public awareness of U.S. military bases in Taiwan has diminished. Therefore, we made efforts in Taiwan to communicate to the public the significance of the anti-base movement in East Asia. Fourth, we promoted an anti-nuclear agenda—opposing both nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. This theme held particular resonance in Japan. Fifth, we highlighted an issue common to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, China: opposition to the distortion of history in textbooks and the pursuit of justice for comfort women. Finally, since the 1990s, the two U.S. invasions of Iraq have made anti-war activism a key focus of the AWC. On this issue, the American leftist organization A.N.S.W.E.R. (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) has collaborated with the AWC in related campaigns.
In contrast, the symposium 'The Cold War and State Terrorism in East Asia' had a relatively short lifespan, lasting only from 1997 to 2002. Its core participants differed somewhat from the previously mentioned New Left activists of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, they were activists from Taiwan, China; Ryukyu (Okinawa); South Korea; and Japan who had been involved in leftist movements during the 1950s—particularly those who had been unconverted long-term prisoners held by White Terror regimes in Taiwan and South Korea. The initiative for this series of symposiums was sparked by the meeting of unconverted long-term prisoners from Taiwan and South Korea in the 1990s. Key figures included Mr. Suh Seung (徐胜), who was imprisoned in South Korea for 19 years; Mr. Kim Sun-myung (金善明), who was incarcerated for 44 years; and Mr. Lin Shuyang (林书扬), who was held by the Kuomintang in Taiwan for 34 years and 7 months (from 1950 to 1984). It was Mr. Lin Shuyang’s visit to South Korea that facilitated the cross-border reunion of these comrades. The three veteran activists then resolved to organize a symposium that would enable the exchange of experiences across East Asia. Thematically, the symposium addressed not only the human rights demands of unconverted long-term prisoners of conscience and the promotion of both cross-Strait and Korean reunification, but also broader issues such as women’s rights, ethnic minorities, comfort women, bacteriological warfare, forced labor under Japanese imperialism, historical revisionism in textbooks, and the struggle of Koreans in Japan against ethnic discrimination. Because South Korea remained under a national security system at the turn of the century and continued to impose severe repression on left-wing activists, the movement was renamed in South Korea as the Symposium on Human Rights and Peace in East Asia to avoid political sensitivity.
In 1993, in Liuzhangli, a suburb of Taipei, a mass grave was discovered containing the remains of Communist Party members who had been brutally executed during the Kuomintang’s White Terror in the 1950s. More than 200 small tombstones were found at the site. This discovery shocked progressive movement groups throughout East Asia and became one of the most direct and powerful pieces of evidence of state terrorism in the region. In South Korea, due to the national security system, unexpected incidents occurred, including the arrest of some participants before they could even attend the symposium. I myself witnessed such events: certain Korean students or teachers who had planned to participate were ultimately unable to appear due to their arrest. In retrospect, these incidents did not belong to some distant past—they were still very much part of our present reality. Since 1997, a total of six international forums have been held under the Symposium on the Cold War and State Terrorism in East Asia. Although there have been no large-scale forums since 2002, smaller workshops have continued to take place, thanks to the continued support of Mr. Suh Seung.
A common feature shared by these two progressive solidarity movements in East Asia was their grounding in similar historical experiences across different regions—for example, the collective memory of White Terror and the reality of divided nations, such as the separation across the Taiwan Strait and between North and South Korea. A comparable divide also exists, to some extent, between Okinawa and mainland Japan. These shared experiences enabled participants to come together to discuss common issues and to pursue shared goals.
Since around 2010, ties among the various international solidarity groups gradually loosened, and the international solidarity efforts of the Taiwan Socialist Unification Faction began to face significant setbacks. The first reason is the passing of earlier generations of activists who had shared experiences. Political prisoners in both South Korea and Taiwan have successively passed away. The second reason is the erosion of clearly defined anti-imperialist objectives. In the past, anti-imperialism was unambiguously directed against the United States and Japan. However, local activists in the Philippines began promoting the concept of “becoming imperialism,” referring to major powers beyond the traditional imperialist states. Some even resonated with separatist movements in places like Taiwan. This diluted the shared anti-imperialist consensus that once underpinned international solidarity—particularly regarding the goal strongly advocated by Taiwan’s representatives: the reunification of China. Third, the consensus once emphasized by international solidarity has increasingly yielded to the local political contexts—such as prevailing “mainstream public opinion”—faced by activists in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Taiwan, China, especially amid the so-called “new Cold War.” This shift has led to two widespread degenerative trends in social movements across these regions: first, a regression toward social democracy; and second, a degeneration from internationalism into xenophobia.
Take Taiwan as an example. Although the Labor Party’s involvement in the AWC movement was grounded in a strong identification with the Third World—or the “Global South”—the mainstream current of Taiwan’s social movements since the pro-democracy movement outside the ruling party has taken a different path. Shaped by Taiwan’s postwar development as a “Newly Industrialized Economy” (NIE), these movements have largely drawn on the experiences and theoretical frameworks of the Global North, even those from Europe and the United States. As a result, the Global South perspective emphasized by both the AWC and the Symposium on the Cold War and State Terrorism in East Asia stands in contrast to the prevailing trends in Taiwan’s current social movements. Consider also the case of the Philippine leftist movement. Though it once built strong bases in both urban and rural areas, it is now under pressure from a xenophobic wave incited by the far-right regime, which weaponizes anti-China rhetoric to consolidate its mass support.
Representatives from the Taiwan region have made significant efforts to represent and promote China. However, due to the frequent absence of delegates from mainland China, it has become increasingly difficult for Taiwan’s representatives to defend China’s stance alone. Even when foreign colleagues understand the position of Taiwan representatives clearly, they are often reluctant to publicly support Taiwan’s prioritized issues—such as defending the Diaoyu Islands, opposing separatism, and supporting reunification. It is worth noting that in recent years, separatist scholars in Taiwan have actively sought to connect with progressive movements in places like Okinawa, attempting to build their own version of “international solidarity.” Yet if these separatists refuse to oppose the U.S. and cannot even speak out against U.S. military bases, how can they claim to build genuine solidarity with progressive movements in Okinawa or elsewhere? The critical question now is: how can the socialist unification faction—which truly opposes imperialism and foreign military bases—help progressive activists in these regions recognize that we are their true allies in the struggle? These are urgent issues that we need to address as soon as possible.
It must be emphasized that many progressive activists around the world today are still capable of making sound judgments based on leftist theory, a solid understanding of China’s history, and even a sense of affinity with China. Here, it is worth recalling several historical precedents. For example, Hungarian Marxist economist E. C. Varga, commissioned by the Communist International, drafted a program for the Sixth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1928, which included a clause asserting that China should reclaim Taiwan. Another example is the writer Chen Yingzhen, who, amid Taiwan’s sharp leftward shift in the 1960s and during his efforts to organize the “Democratic Taiwan Alliance,” received enthusiastic support from his Japanese leftist friend Asai Motofumi for his advocacy of Chinese reunification. Also noteworthy is the critique of Taiwan separatism offered by the writer Ozaki Hotsuki, the younger brother of Ozaki Hotsumi. Without a proper understanding of history and a solid theoretical foundation, how could Hungarians or Japanese leftists have advanced such progressive positions? And today, those who maintain similarly correct judgments have by no means disappeared. For instance, in recent years, a radical Japanese activist group has launched movements opposing a new U.S.-Japan invasion of China, while the aforementioned American organization A.N.S.W.E.R. has continued its active resistance against anti-China forces in the United States. These examples all demonstrate that dialogue and solidarity between China and the global progressive movement are not mere wishful thinking.
Of course, whether it is China engaging in dialogue with the global progressive movement or expecting the movement to speak on behalf of China, the socialist unification faction in Taiwan—and indeed the broader leftist movement—has increasingly spoken unconditionally in support of the mainland, largely due to its own growing weakness. In other words, the next phase of the movement should focus on how both sides of the Taiwan Strait—as parts of one China—can act in concert to engage in meaningful dialogue with the global progressive movement and the Global South. This is a shared task that the Chinese people, on both sides of the Strait, must undertake together.