Volume 47, Number 11 · June 29, 2000
'Taiwan Stands Up'
By Jonathan Mirsky
Politics in Taiwan is a deadly business, sometimes literally. Chen Shui-bian's first public act, on the morning of his inauguration as president on May 20, was to carry his wife in his arms to their waiting car. In 1985 she had been run down by a car while her husband, one of the leaders of the then-illegal opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which has now come to supreme power, was campaigning for a local magistrate's post. Mr. Chen has always maintained that she was the victim of an assassination attempt by agents of the ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT). His wife never walked again. Moreover, the new transportation minister, Yeh Chu-lan, was widowed in the early Nineties when her husband burned himself to death protesting the government's restrictions on free speech. And in 1980, while the man who is now DPP chairman, Lin Yi-hsiung, was in jail, an assassin stabbed to death his mother and twin daughters.
Feature, 2721 words
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