The Chinese in America - Iris Chang [148]
Censorship was strictly enforced, as intelligence officials freely steamed open and read the public’s letters. Not only did the citizens lose their right to privacy, but also their right to free speech and unfettered access to information. Foreign publications were sanitized as they came through the mail: bureaucrats, rifling through American magazines like Time and Life, stamped on each photograph of Mao Zedong the Chinese character Fei—“bandit”—for the benefit of unenlightened readers. Creative works, no matter how small, were scrutinized for hidden political messages. For example, when Dick Ling was moonlighting as a freelance cartoonist during his college years, he was warned by a Taiwanese newspaper editor never to draw “bald old men with little moustaches,” because they might be perceived as caricatures of Chiang Kai-shek.
People were punished simply for careless, offhand remarks. Carl Hsu remembered that during his military service in Taiwan, the authorities ordered the entire boot camp to join in a group denunciation of Communist and Marxist philosophy. One boy asked how he could do this since he was not legally allowed to read books on the subject. “That student got into deep, deep trouble,” Hsu recalled. “Even though we were very young, we were trained to be very careful about what we said.”
The government even discouraged its citizens from building their own shortwave radios, for fear of their listening to broadcasts from the People’s Republic of China, an activity outlawed by the Nationalist government. Shortwave radios were also associated with espionage, because they could enable secret communication with the mainland. “You couldn’t even buy vacuum tubes then,” remembered Ching Peng, a Chinese American engineer from Taiwan. “The KMT was paranoid about people using the tubes to build shortwave radios.” Caught with such a radio, one of his relatives ended up with a three-year jail term, even though there was no evidence whatsoever that he had tuned in to any Communist propaganda.
As the years went by, a schism opened. between parents and children in many Nationalist families. Some parents could not free themselves from the past, and for the rest of their lives they would obsess, bitterly, on lost fortunes and ruined careers. Some could talk of nothing but their glory days in China—their mansions, their servants, their titles—and how it had all vanished overnight in the 1949 Communist revolution. Some clung to a dream—which grew more remote with each passing year—that one day the Nationalists would somehow expel the Communists, reclaim their rightful role as leaders of China, and restore the émigrés to their former, proper status in Chinese life.
Their children took a more realistic view. While many would fondly recall the beautiful island where they had come of age, most came to detest the pinched xenophobia of the Nationalist government, which reduced the culture to a near-monolithic society controlled by an oligarchy of aging politicians. This generation had little interest in returning to mainland China, now a Communist society even more constraining than Taiwan. Once these young people accepted that their future did not lie here, two questions arose: where would they go to build their futures, and how would they get there?
Science and technology provided the means to get them out of Taiwan. Within a few years, the island would undergo an industrial revolution so breathtakingly rapid it would be heralded worldwide as an economic miracle.
One of the most formidable tasks the KMT faced in the 1950s was building a modern economy almost from scratch. Like many tropical economies based on the ready availability of at least a subsistence diet, Taiwan had little concern about foreign-trade balances, and consequently no interest in developing foreign export. Aid from the United States paid much of the cost of sustaining the huge government bureaucracy, but the Nationalist leadership understood that Taiwan could not long survive in the changing global arena without the