The KMT’s top-down political and social control finally faced a crisis in 1979 with the famous “Formosa incident” (Meilidao shijian). Formosa (“beautiful island,’’ a name given to Taiwan by Portuguese traders in the sixteenth century) was a magazine published by leading political dissidents, most of whom identified themselves as ethnic Taiwanese, not Chinese. Formosa was founded as a direct means to spread oppositional views. The dissidents assembled a rally in Kaohsiung, Taiwan’s second city, away from the political center of Taipei, to voice their demands for democracy.
The rally ended with a brutal crackdown and the arrest of almost all the elite members of the opposition. Evidence of police brutality was quickly and neatly suppressed. The rally was officially characterized as a “political disturbance and subversion of national security.” Yet the Formosa incident led intellectuals and middle-class cultural elites to reconsider issues of political and cultural legitimacy as represented by the KMT and its ideological foundations.
Anachronistic sinocentrism was under pressure and Taiwan nativism was upheld as a new direction for cultural production in an increasingly modernized, open society. Government’s brutal suppression of oppositional voices galvanized artists and writers to react in their own fields. If political liberation was premature and couldn’t be tolerated by the ruling regime, then perhaps milder reforms could be achieved in less threatening areas such as art, culture, and the cinema. Xiao Ye was in New York City when he discovered the uncensored reports of the Formosa incident. He decided to drop everything and returned home, starting a “revolution” from within. Upon his return, he entered CMPC to “work on the cinema and within the institution that I despised the most.”
[Taiwan, Treasure Island, 64-65]
See aldo Udden p49-50.
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