Taiwan’s Mandela

On 13 January, Taiwan held its eighth presidential election in history.

Harvard-educated former physician William Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim (former Taiwanese representative to the US) became the president-elect and vice president-elect of Taiwan.

Two days later, “Nori” Shih Ming-teh, statesman and veteran democracy activist in Taiwan, who spent nearly 26 years behind bars, passed away at the age of 83.

While Shih had never been elected as president, he is dubbed as “Taiwan’s Nelson Mandela” for promoting the end of authoritarian rule during the martial-law period and fighting his whole life for a democratic and better Taiwan.

At 22 years old, Shih Ming-teh was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the independence movement.

He was tortured during the interrogation and beaten so hard that all his teeth were knocked out.

Shih was released after serving 15 years. In 1978, he married American political and human rights activist Linda Arrigo but, in 1979, the Formosa Incident happened demanding freedom of expression, free public debate and an end to one-party rule, Shih was involved in the movement, arrested and sentenced to death at first, but under international pressure, sentenced to life in prison for the second time.

Before the trial, Linda Arrigo was deported from Taiwan but she brought international media attention to the Formosa Incident. Her mother Nellie Gephardt Amondson had been working with her and canvassing the US Congress with a flier, “Has my son-in-law been executed?”

Something extraordinary about Shih was that, even after Taiwan lifted martial law in 1987, and then-President Chiang Ching-kuo was considering granting him a pardon, Shih insisted that he was not guilty and continued his hunger strike, refusing to be released.

Shih Ming-teh eventually ended his four-year-and-seven-month hunger strike in 1990 after then-President Lee Teng-hui declared that the Formosa Incident judgment was void. But, before that, he was forced to feed through a gastric tube 3,040 times.

It is fair to say that, without the fight of Shih and thousands of other political activists, Taiwanese cannot enjoy freedom of expression and direct elections of the president today.

Compared to the Philippines and many other countries around the world, one may notice that, while Taiwan produces over 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and is one of the world’s leading producers of information and communications technology products, it still requires voters to go back to their registered places of residence to vote and ballot papers are still counted manually.

According to Bloomberg News, a study of 262 political systems conducted by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance found that only 53 of them require in-person voting.

It means Taiwanese living abroad must take time off from work, buy air tickets and fly back home if they want to vote. At the same time, police officers, healthcare workers and media workers who can’t leave their posts are kept from voting.

The data of the Overseas Community Affairs Council shows that, in 2022, the Taiwanese diaspora was pegged at 2.08 million (including children), and those who are eligible to vote cannot do so without going back to Taiwan.

Nonetheless, facing imminent threats from a strong neighbor, the value of Taiwan’s system is that it is hard to infiltrate.

If Taiwan moves away from this straightforward system, it opens up the possibility for less people to trust in election results.

Many international election observers also found the way poll workers in Taiwan read out each ballot while displaying them for public scrutiny makes it difficult to manipulate the results of the elections, and it is uplifting to see citizens exercise their democratic rights to freely elect their own government and representatives.