by Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong democracy activist in Taiwan who spent more than two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president of his former party, deceased on January 15, his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital.
The cause was complications from an operation to remove a liver tumor, said his wife, Chia-chiun Chen Shih.
Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally broken up by police and is now considered a a turn point on Taiwan’s path from authoritarianism to democracy. When he was tried for the confrontation, he smiled defiantly at the camerasalthough his original teeth had been shattered years earlier under police torture, and he presented a groundbreaking argument for Taiwan’s independence from China, an idea banned under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.
“I was imprisoned for 25 years and faced the possibility of the death penalty twice, but each time I came out, I immediately threw myself back into the whole effort to overthrow the Chiang family dictatorship,” Mr. Shih said in an interview with The New York Times in 2022. “I am someone who never had youth.”
He began a life of protest when he was a teenager. He was first accused of illegal political activities at age 21. His two prison terms (including, he estimated, 13 years in solitary confinement) only seemed to stiffen his defiance.
He was honored as a hero when Taiwan emerged as a democracy in the 1990s and became leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, the island’s first major opposition party in the new era. But in 2006, he led mass protests against Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan’s progressive democratic president, whom Shih had once supported.
Shih died two days after Taiwan held its eighth direct democratic vote to elect a president. After his death, many Taiwanese, including some who had clashed with him, praised his role in Taiwan’s democratization. Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, who previously had her own tensions with him, visited him in the hospital the day before his death.
Shih “dedicated himself to the democratic movement in authoritarian times and was a pioneer of democracy and human rights in Taiwan, with far-reaching influence,” Tsai wrote in a tribute to Mr. Shih.
Shi Ming-teh was born January 15, 1941 in Kaohsiung, a port city in southern Taiwan. He was the fourth of six children Shih Kuo Tsui, a doctor, and Shih Chen Ying, who supervised the house. The family was well-off, but Mr. Shih’s childhood was overshadowed by war and repression, and Mr. Shih said those memories had shaped him throughout his life.
Taiwan became caught in the war between Japan, which had occupied the island as a colony for more than half a century, and advancing American forces. Mr. Shih remembered US bombers attack Kaohsiung. After Japan’s defeat, Chinese nationalist troops took control of Taiwan and ruthlessly eradicated opposition. Mr. Shih recalled seeing nationalist troops shoot students. at Kaohsiung train station.
He later said that his early years had set him up as a rebel against the waves of colonialists who had ruled Taiwan for centuries; he considered the nationalists fleeing China, defeated by Mao Zedong’s communist forces in 1949, to be the last in his ranks.
“Taiwan is not part of China,” Shih wrote in a book published in 2021. “On the contrary, China is nothing more than a part of Taiwan’s history.”
When Shih was in high school, nationalists had turned Taiwan into a fortress against Mao’s China, and he and some classmates formed a secret amateur society dedicated to achieving Taiwan’s independence. He enrolled in a military academy and told his mother that he had done it only to learn how to mount an armed insurrection against the nationalists.
Mrs. Shih was an officer in Little Kinmen —a Nationalist-controlled island dangerously close to the Chinese coast—when police officers came to arrest him in 1962. Investigators had discovered his role in the independence society and seemed convinced that the group was part of a much larger plot. They beat Mr. Shih to obtain evidence and his teeth were broken or then knocked out.
Mr. Shih was surprised when the judge sentenced him to life in prison for sedition, he said, and not the death penalty he had expected. When he was granted early release in 1977, he threw himself back into opposition activities, despite the risk of being caught violating the conditions of his parole and being sent back to prison.
“I could see he was working like a man on fire to challenge authoritarian rule.” Linda Gail Arrigoan American academic and pro-democracy activist in Taiwan, who was married to Mr. Shih from 1978 to 1995, said in a recent interview with the Archivos Formosa podcast. “He expected to die in prison…by execution.”
By the late 1970s, the nationalists’ grip on Taiwanese society had begun to loosen and opposition groups began to spread. Shih and other activists founded a magazine, “Formosa,” as a vehicle for their cause. He established offices throughout Taiwan, recruited supporters, and held meetings.
The United States’ decision to change diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 galvanized the opposition, and Taiwan’s nationalist government took drastic measures, leading to the clash in Kaohsiung in December of that year in which hundreds of police broke up the march organized by Mr. Shih and others.
Many of his colleagues were quickly arrested, but Shih eluded police for nearly a month before being captured and tried along with seven others. An arrest photo showed his jaw covered in bandages, the result of a hasty attempt at plastic surgery to alter his appearance.
The trial drew further attention to his calls for democracy, especially as the government, eager to prove its case to the Taiwanese public and the world at large, allowed international journalists and observers into the courtroom. Tall and thin, Shih smiled at the cameras, hands stuffed in his pockets, in what he said was an effort to convey easy-going confidence.
He used the trial to attack the Nationalist government’s position that Taiwan was part of China. Instead, he argued, Taiwan had been separated from China for decades and had effectively become independent, even if Taiwan’s rulers did not accept that reality. That argument would enter the political current of the island.
“Today, these claims do not seem anything out of the ordinary, but at the time they were a breakthrough,” Shih wrote in an account of the trial published in 2021. “My smile and my political counterattack were the reason why the Tyrants, do not dare to execute me.”
Sentenced to another life sentence for sedition, he continued his defiance from prison, even as society outside began to open up. He went on hunger strikes to protest the killing of opposition figures and their families and was force-fed about 3,000 times between 1985 and 1990, his former aide Huang Hui-chun said in an interview.
In 1987, Taiwan’s President Lee Teng-hui offered to release prisoners from the so-called Kaohsiung Incident, but Mr. Shih refused. He said he would only get out of prison if he was completely exonerated. That step came in 1990, and Mr. Shih reentered a bubbling Taiwanese society.
His long fight for democracy gave him wide influence and he became a legislator and president of the Democratic Progressive Party, which emerged as the central opposition to the nationalists. But after decades of imprisonment, Shih did not always feel comfortable in Taiwan’s new politics.
When Democratic Progressive Party candidate Chen Shui-bian won Taiwan’s presidential election in 2000, many supporters of Taiwanese self-government were elated by his surprise victory. But Mr. Shih was more cautious. He quit the party to emphasize his political independence and then turned against Chen, angered by mounting corruption allegations.
In 2006, Shih organized the “Red Shirt” movement that drew hundreds of thousands of people to protests outside the presidential palace in Taipei calling for Chen’s removal from office. (Mr. Chen resigned in 2008 and was later convicted on corruption charges. He was released from prison in 2015 on medical parole.)
Shih seemed to enjoy being back in the political fray and mingled with the crowd, sometimes wearing a T-shirt proclaiming him a “commander in chief” of the movement.
“If I look young, it’s because I was frozen for 25 years,” he told the New York Times at the time, referring to his years in prison.
But his renewed prominence alienated some friends who were aligned with the Democratic Progressive Party and unhappy that he had worked with Nationalist Party politicians. Shih argued that he had been trying to protect democracy and that that effort had been more important than partisan ties.
He married Chia-chiun Chen Shih, his second wife, in 1996. He is also survived by his two daughters, Mino Shih and Jasmine Shih. Mr. Shih also had two daughters from a previous relationship.
In his later years, Mr. Shih promoted proposals for finding common ground between China and Taiwan, ideas that some of his former friends considered naive. He published three volumes chronicling his trials and decades of imprisonment. Ms. Chen Shih said those times had tormented him.
“He told me that during the day he knew how to let go of his hate, but that those things came back to him at night in his dreams,” she said. “All that left a deep mark on him.”
