 Good evening. Welcome to the second event of the three-day Wan Ren film screening series. After last night's screening of the film, Super Citizen Code, we are honoured to have Dr. Silver Ling here to give a lecture entitled Accountability and Redemption, sorry, Cinematic Representation of Atrocity in Taiwan. This lecture reflects on how Taiwanese cinema makes sense of the past and deals with national trauma. Before Dr. Ling resigned recently to become a full-time writer and translator, she was Associate Professor of Chinese in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Notre Dame. She is a prolific researcher, writer and translator and has won many awards for her sophisticated translations. For example, she is a winner of the Liang Shichou Literary Translation Prize. In addition, she has also written quite a lot of books. For example, a single author book on representing atrocity in Taiwan, The Two to A Incident and The White Terror in Taiwan, that's published in 2007 in America. So actually, this particular book, there's a chapter focused and dedicated to Wan Ren's this particular film. And also she also co-edited a volume documenting Taiwan on film, issues and methods in new documentaries. It was published in 2012. Later, when the lecture finished, Nikki will be announcing, actually, he's going to sell some copies of books that are provided by Roundledge and have a very good price. So now please let's put our hands together and give her a warm welcome. Dr. Selva Ling, please. Thank you. Good evening. First I'd like to thank Dr. Fell for inviting me here and then thank you all for coming. I understand the summer is the damn time and I'm very happy that you are here. I just wanted to know if every one of you have seen the movie last night? Yes. Quite a lot of people. So I won't be giving a synopsis of the movie if that's all right. But in order to contextualize the film and make my arguments more understandable, I think I'll give a very brief historical background. So for those of you who are familiar with Taiwan, please bear with me. I will start with 1945. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Taiwan became part of the Republic of China, headed by Zhang Kai-shek. Problems following the end of the war and the withdrawal of the colonial government was compounded by other troubles resulting from the arrival of the new government, which culminated in the February 28th incident. When Taiwan was plunged into a flurry of protest uprisings and armed rebellion, on March 8th, a large contingent of troops from the Chinese mainland arrived in northern China to quell the unrest. When order was finally restored in late March, 10,000 to 20,000 Taiwanese had been killed or disappeared. In late 1949, the national's government was driven off the mainland by the communists and fled to Taiwan. In May 1949, martial law was declared to ensure the total submission of the Taiwanese, thus beginning a reign of white terror and the two-to-eight incident became a taboo. In the name of stability and security, the national's government immediately stripped residents of Taiwan of their civil liberties, creating an atmosphere of pervasive fear with the garrison command responsible for arresting and punishing individuals who allegedly threatened national security and public order. Civilians were subject to arrest by military personnel and trial by military courts. By one estimate, military courts trial the cases of more than 10,000 civilians. While many of those arrested were intellectuals who voiced dissent, there was also a substantial number of innocent people falsely incarcerated, either by over-eager agents of the garrison command or vengeful enemies who made false accusations. Family members of those who died or disappeared in the immediate aftermath of the two-to-eight incident were harassed and watched. Intellectuals who often charged with sedition simply because they belonged to reading groups like the main character in the film you saw last night. Even those who were abroad could not escape the net of persecution. The national's government in store spies were recruited informants among overseas students to report on anyone who voiced criticism of the government and or were engaged in activities related to the mainland communist China. Once martial law was lifted in 1987, the floodgates opened and enrushed an outpouring of text on Taiwan's past, including fiction, collections of poetry, reportage, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, historical research, archival documents, conference proceedings, and feature and documentary films. As the people in Taiwan failed the urgent need to remember, reconstruct, and rewrite that part of their history. What is at stake in this reconstruction process is best illustrated by Pierre Genet's distinction of habit memory, the automatic integration of new information without much conscious attention to what is happening, and narrative memory, consisting of mental constructs which people used to make sense out of experience. In the case of post martial law Taiwan, where many people feel they have been robbed of their past, there lies the danger that what one reads or sees in literary and cinematic text may not be actively or consciously analyzed. Uninterrogated textual and screen memories then form one's own memory of the past. On the other hand, a stamenic look at her points out in his discussion of memory as a crucial source for history and his complicated relations to documentary source. In a quote, even in the falsification, repression, displacements, and denial, memory can nonetheless be informative, not in terms of an accurate empirical representation of its subject, but in terms of the subject's open anxiety-ridden reception and assimilation by both participants in events and those born later, end of quote. The issue then is not to reject memory as unreliable, but to be informed of its imperfect nature as one members of the past without being paralyzed or manipulated by that memory. Confronting the Taiwanese is also the problem of imagining an event that the writers and filmmakers themselves have not lived through and have to reconstruct out of someone else's memory, be that someone, a government archive or survivors of the event. Consequently, people who must often learn about their past through textual and cinematic representations are similarly twice removed from that past. Memory is never innocent how and what one remembers is inevitably colored by one's perspective or politics, especially when dealing with atrocity. What is termed the politics of memory is in effect rhetoric about the past mobilized for political purposes. It is precisely this politic of memory that demands these texts to be examined closely. For a film that is based on someone else's memory, Super Citizen quote, provides us with an opportunity to look at the case of Taiwan in dealing with government atrocity. Super Citizen quote revolves around an intellectual who was a member of the reading group in the 1950s. Like many of his contemporaries, he is arrested for reading prohibited material and charged with an intent to subvert the government. While under torture, he reels the name of another reading group member, Chen Zhengyi, who then takes the claim as the leader of the group and is later executed. And here, the name, I don't know if one and the director mentioned the name yesterday. Xu Yisheng's name in Taiwanese, Kou Yixing meaning to suffer to one's life. Chen Zhengyi, Zhengyi is justice, so when justice is dead, the Taiwanese have to suffer their whole life. Kou is sentenced to 16 years in prison on an offshore island, shortly after the beginning of his incarceration. Kou hands a divorce paper to his devoted wife with the intention of sparing her embarrassment and suffering, but she commits suicide, leaving her young daughter to fend for herself. When Kou is released, he goes into self-imposed exile, cocooning himself in a nursing home for 12 years. Until one day, a dream about the execution of Chen Zhengyi prompts him to reenter society and embark on a quest for Chen's burial site. Settling into the comfortable apartment of his now married daughter, Kou roams the street of Taipei and travels out of town, looking at old friends to inquire into the location of Chen's grave site. When he finally finds it in the overgrown bamboo grove, Kou lights up the area with candles to offer his apology. The film starts in media risk with Kou waking up in the nursing home, and his past is relived and recounted to the audience through interior monologue during his quest. Well, sometimes he feels like it's part of his diary, like his writing diary, but nevertheless, it's interior monologue that is in his head. One critic has argued that what Kou is searching for is himself, and his only path to redemption is trying to find his friend's grave site. If we follow this analysis that Kou's search is a kind of cell rediscovery, then the memory dredged up in the process becomes a form of redemption that finally delivers him from his suffering over his past action. We also find reinforcements of this interpretation in the candlelit ending, but we must ask how this redemption is possible or whether it is even necessary and how the film is a cinematic recreation of the white terror informs our understanding of representing government persecution of intellectuals. Finally, it remains questionable as to how closure functions. This evening, I would like to focus on two aspects of the film, cinematic recreational, recreational government atrocity and the issue of accountability. Much of what we learn about Kou's past and present emotional state is related through his interior monologue. Although it is a convenient and convincing cinematic technique for an old man who has just come out of self-imposed isolation, interior monologue is in itself a strategic option for soliloquy and interior monologue are cinematic codes for exteriorizing thought. Their conventions work to the same end in making unspoken thoughts available for the audience, whether the character is alone or in the presence of others. When this language undertakes to tell a story, we have a narrational activity that calls for a covering term to represent a common mental origin, the mind-screen narration. What is most illuminating in the employment of this technique is the fact that mind-screen narration were not limited to being tools for conveying the main story, but were seized upon for dramatic scenes of self-confrontation. For Supercism, well, the main character's interior monologue in which he questions the meaning of political ideals and omits his guilt allows him to confront a past that he has tried to suppress. In addition to the critical function of self-confrontation, interior monologue also creates a subtle but important impression of course world as a form of political prisoner. Since other characters may be present but do not hear the words, the sense of isolation is intensified. In other words, interior monologue allows the director to insulate quote from society to stress the detrimental effect of political persecution. An invisible label has been attached to a formal political prisoner. They have no choice but to live in isolation. Moreover, the damage to their mental health and psychological well-being cannot be easily verbalized. As a consequence, post-interior monologue surfaced a symbolic function when he talks to himself and no one else. It is not dissimilar to the attempt made by his fellow political prisoner to ensure his own safety. During the previous year, his friend, Professor Wu, has suddenly come down with a form of paranoia. He wears headphones and listens to propaganda broadcasts all day, all day long to ensure to assure the listening device that he believed the government has implanted in his head that he has nothing but pure patriotic thoughts. Wu's wife tells Guo that he has repeatedly told her husband that martial law has been lifted but he never believed her. A Susan Bresen points out, quote, when a trauma is of human origin and is intentionally inflicted, it is not only shared as one's fundamental assumptions about the world and one's safety in it, but also serves as sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity. End of quote. Most ironic is the fact that Professor Wu's persecution complex appears only after the lifting of martial law when freedoms of speech and congregation are finally available to the people, the past comes back to haunt him and plunges the victim of the white terror into a paranoid state. He is, in essence, the victim of history as tragedy, in the sense posited by a film's historian, in the quote, in history as tragedy, people are seen as the product of their context, their structural consciousness, their forms of perception, their ways of being in and relating to the world have been inexorably shaped by their historical experience. They are caught in the past. End of quote. Certainly only through such a portrayal can the devastating effect of the white terror be conveyed most profoundly. As a film that deals with the white terror, Super Citizen Guo uses flashbacks and evokes various kinds of memories and events in central theme. As Maureen Turin points out, in quote, by suddenly presenting the past, flashbacks can abruptly offer new meanings connected to any person, place, or object. Flashbacks then gain a particularly rich dimension in the coding of the psychology of character and because their evidence is in the past, they immediately imply a psychoanalytical dimension of personality, end of quote. In Super Citizen Guo, we see ample instances of such coding, but what is most significant is that we see flashbacks of both Guo and his daughter, Xiu Qin, when their memories flash back to them, discrepancy inevitably occurs. A simple explanation for the variants is the cliché that people remember thing differently. People do not have the same recollection about an event because the event does not carry the same meaning and importance to each one of them. It is through this variation in memory and interpretation of that memory that Super Citizen Guo conveys the aftermath of the white terror. The most obvious discrepancy in memory occurs in Guo's and his daughter's recollection of the prison visit during which Guo hands his wife the divorce paper. In Guo's flashback, his wife sits down, smiles, and looks up at him. A reverse shot shows Guo looking at her and giving her the divorce paper. She takes the paper, gets up, and starts to leave, then turns to look at him before finally walking away. Then most of the flashbacks, this scene is presented in complete silence, but the emotional turmoil in both characters' minds is clearly depicted through the wordless exchange between husband and wife. Later when his daughter tells her own memory of the same visit, however, we see her standing behind her mother watching the wordless exchange between her parents the whole time. When the mother gets up to leave, the daughter hesitates and then follows her mother out. The daughter's flashback of the prison scene is also presented in total silence and is not essentially different from that from what the father remembers. However, the different perspective inevitably distort their memories. To quote Ma-Ring Turing again, certain characters get certain kinds of flashbacks at given moments and analysis of a film can benefit from remarking not only on the presence of a given flashback but the absence of others not only on what information is presented in the flashback but what is left out, end of quote. What is left out in the father's flashback is the presence of the daughter and as she complains to her aging father later, her feelings and her life after the mother's suicide. Early in the film, we are already familiar with the father's lack of interaction with his daughter as well as with her husband and son. Her recollection of the prison scene highlights her absence in her father's mind. Critic Turnu-Shio argues that quote gradually realizes that he is forgotten by the world just as he forgot about his wife and daughter as he wasted his life for his ideals. In other words, Turnu believes that the aging quote is looking back at his life in regret and wishes undone. As Turnu said, for he wants to prove that the past is just a dream and nothing is real, end of quote. While we cannot deny that Kuo's youth was ruined by the absurdity of the era of the white terror, Kuo was simplifying the situation to reach Super Citizen Kuo as a film about regret for one's youth. In my view, the film exemplifies a persistent question of allocating appropriate narrative space to the public and the private. The public, as with the government control apparatus, is constantly invading the private sphere of familial life. We detect a contest between the private and the public in these two flashbacks. For Kuo, the intellectual who joined a reading group, his concern was the public, the political situation of Taiwan in the 1950s. His decision to divorce his wife in the belief that he will spare her hardship is made with little regard for her private emotional state, which is best illustrated in her suicide. For his daughter, on the other hand, the ordeal is all personal, which is why she is dessert against getting involved in politics. Her flashback of the boat ride home after the fatal visit further accentuates the contrast between father's and daughter's memories. Her mother is standing against the wind, and the daughter watches her mother as the ladder rips the divorce paper to pieces. To be sure, Kuo has no way of knowing about the boat trip. However, the daughter's recollection of the trip indirectly reveals the effect of the white terror on the people's private life. In her case, her father is arrested because he has read some books with a few friends, and I mean, known as to her, she will soon become a virtual orphan. The flashback is most poignant for an adult recalling the incident many years later, but she now knows what the paper entails and what goes on in her heartbroken mother's mind. Her father's well-intentioned plan ultimately causes a mother's death. In the white terror era, there was no distinction between the public and the private. For everything one does and thinks fall into the all-pervasive jurisdiction of the police state. A telling example is given in the film, the sister of another persecuted is sentenced to three years in prison simply because she served tea to the reading group when they gathered at her house. The notion that private life can never be saved from the invasive and pervasive government control mechanism is further reinforced in a different kind of memory which I shall call fabricated memory in that the characters either dream or imagine a scene in the past that they cannot have witnessed. In the beginning of the film, before the opening credits, we see the headlights of trucks in the dark slithering through a wild field. One of the trucks turned out to be a military vehicle transporting soldiers who will then execute the prisoners in the other truck. Then we see three prisoners kneel on the ground and one after another shot in the back. Except for the three gunshots, the scene, like others, does not have any conversation among characters. The next scene shows a trembling hand clawing at a blanket. The camera of them slowly pans up to close sleeping face. He opens his eyes and the camera cuts to the execution scene again in which the third prisoner, Chen Zhongyi, falls forward as the bullet pierces his body, dark blood oozing out to stain his white shirt. A slight variation of the scene reappears as Kuo swatched back when he visited Youth Park, the former execution ground. In this scene, Chen Zhongyi is shown in full frontal shot when he looks up and then falls forward at the sound of the gunshot. As critics have pointed out, Kuo cannot have witnessed the execution of his friend. Rather, he dreams or creates the scene out of his own imagination after seeing Chen's raised hand to indicate the sentence he has received. In one of the flashbacks, Kuo hears the sound of chains clanging against the floor and walks up to the opening on his prison cell door to see Chen being let away. Chen raises his hand, his left showing two fingers of his left hand and one of his right hand, indicating the death sentence for political prisoners according to Article 2, Section 1 of the martial law. The knowledge gained from Chen's hand gesture leads Kuo to fabricate the scene of Chen's execution and serve as the motivation of force behind his termination of self-exile. Let us observe by Robert T. Kuo, since Kuo himself was not present at this event, nor does he find any witness to the execution, the image wavers between Kuo's point of view dream vision and the reality that no one in the film claims. The film strongly suggests that execution scene is part of Kuo's dream, but the scene is repeated shown with slight variation in the form of flashbacks. To some, the repetitive and gory side of an execution may seem gratuitous or unnecessary. Needless to say, the issue concerning the cathartic function of screen violence can never be resolved, and hence it may be fruitful for us to consider instead the mnemonic power of Kuo's fabrication or dream. That is, as a movie with a clear ideological agenda, Super Citizen Kuo does not simply recreate a page of Taiwan's history, the past, instead it also creates a memory of that past, the future knowledge of the past. For screen memory cannot be strictly individual in as much as it is symbolic and hence into subjective. The director once disclosed in an interview that he was interested in creating a contrast between past and present to conduct a sort of reflection on Taiwan. But this process is far from being a mere cinematic recreation. Instead, it has strong political ramification, as one historian puts it, what we are faced with, what we are living is the constitution of both group membership and individual identity out of a dynamically chosen selection of memories and the constant reshaping, reinvention and reinforcement of those memories as members contest and create the boundaries and links among themselves. End of quote. In similar fashion, but focusing again on the private domain Quo's daughter, Xiu Qin, fabricates a memory about her mother's death in a flashback from her perspective. After the mother and daughter return home from the visit during which Quo hints as white divorce paper, Xiu Qin is seen sitting on the bed to let her mother comb her hair. Xiu Qin then goes to sleep while her mother is there at herself in the mirror and swallows some pills. Then the camera cuts to the mother sitting against the Japanese style door frame, burning letters and a wedding photo. Xiu Qin cannot have witnessed her mother's activity. More likely she later inverts them from the ashes and perhaps from a diagnosis of her mother's the cause of her mother's death. This imagined scene is inserted in Xiu Qin's flashback between her recollection of the boat ride from the boat ride home from the memory of a mother playing the piano one last time. These details form the memory of the young girl whose father's action inadvertently brings on her mother's suicide and leaves her an orphan. Xiu Qin's fabricated memory serves two purposes. First, by inserting this imagined scene in her recollection of her mother's last visit she points a finger at her father neglecting his responsibility as a husband and a father, thus dispelling the myth about the family of political prisoners. Brandon revealed in the same interview his objection to the heroic and sympathetic images portrayed in pre-media. He said, in fact I discovered that subconsciously the family members of political prisoners were bitter and were unable to forgive, resent for even. End of quote. Xiu Qin's resentment offers an important symbolic dissenting voice in the representation of white terror and explodes the monolithic memory of the victims and their family members as understanding and self-sacrificing. Yet one cannot ignore the fact that Xiu Qin's mother commits suicide without regard for her well-being. After her mother's death she is passed around among relatives and must deal with police harassment alone. How do we then interpret the problem of culpability? Is the film implying that the KMT's fault police during the white terror is the sole culprit and that people that quote his wife and daughter are simply punished? To answer these questions we must return to the issue of memory in flashback and the notion that a chosen selection of memory shapes and reshapes a social group and an individual. In the case of super-system Guo one can posit that Xiu Qin's memories are intended to be representative of the memories of all victims of the white terror and more importantly the memories in total. The film appeals to the sensibility of the average movie goer and lacks a greater measure of profound self-in-reflection. There is an easily discernible parallel between the film creating the story of victims of white terror and the daughter of a political prisoner imagining the last scene of a mother's death. Consequently in a perverse but clearly unintended way the film calls into question the construction and transmission of memory. The past remains mired in the past of Xiu Qin and her memories fabricated or real served primarily to vent her resentment and bitterness. She is in the word represented of the kind of victims family that dramatize the director's politics. When a part of the past is presented as a flashback in super-citizen Guo with few exceptions it is attached to either Guo or his daughter as memory, imagined or not. And precisely because of the differences in their disparate perspectives the screen memories they impart to the audience serve to underscore the disastrous repercussions of Taiwanese suffered under martial law. These screen effects are furthermore achieved through flashbacks with unknown or unclear originators or what I will call floating memories and their function in conveying the notion of redemption. In one scene with floating memory Guo approaches a noodle stand the camera moves closer and closer from close perspective to finally focus on the stand owner's face. The owner looks up and blinks a few times in the watering mist of the stinging noodles followed by a brief flashback of Guo on the truck very likely after the search of his house. In his flashback Guo is shown in a medium shot looking slightly to his left possibly at the birthmark on the soldier's face. Then the camera cuts to the soldier who likes a cigarette and exhales before returning to look at Guo. These two scenes have the effect of a shot reversed shot often used in the scene when two characters are engaged in the conversation. We are usually shown the face of A speaking then the camera cuts to B. This reversal of perspective gives the audience the impression that we are looking at A from B's angle and looking at B from A's viewpoint. If we apply this reading to the two scenes in flashbacks, we first look at the soldier from Guo's perspective as the former lights up his cigarette. Then we see Guo from the soldier's point of view. If this is the case, this flashback is an ambiguous originator for it could be Guo or the former soldier turned noodle stand owner or it could be both. The blurring of flashback perspective implies that both the soldier and Guo are implicated in a political turmoil that is beyond their control. Later when the former soldier and the former political prisoner sit down at a noodle stand to share a drink, the former soldier says with a straight face back then I was only charged with arresting people. The subtext of his declarative statement is that he was simply following orders and was by the cock in the KMT's machinery of operation and persecution. In their conversation, the former soldier says to Guo that Taiwanese were not the only group targeted as many mainlanders who uttered any discontent were also arrested and sentenced to eight to ten years in prison. In a somewhat apologist fashion, the former soldiers offer the explanation for the KMT's policy that many innocent people arrested in order to ensure that not a single communist infiltrator was spared, which was precisely the circumstance of the white terror. In a heyday of the collective anti-communist paranoia, everyone was a suspect and everyone could be the patriarchal help expose the communist if one was vigilant enough. The political climate at a time demanded that everyone be part of the anti-communist enterprise. As a consequence, participants like the former soldier can be excused for taking part in enforcing the law. However, much as one would like to forgive food soldiers like the noodle stand owner, the scene still conveys a sense of absurdity which forcing the audience to reflect upon issues of reconciliation and responsibility. On the one hand, when feels a sense of unease of seeing the former political prisoner drinking with the same the man who ransacked his house and terrified his family not to mention that the organization he served indirectly cost the death of his wife. On the other hand, one wonders exactly how such an encounter should be portrayed cinematically. One of this original plan for the movie was to depict a former political prisoner's search for those who were responsible for his incarceration and to seek revenge. But he changes mind when he learned more about the families of the victims. Redemption replaces revenge as the central theme of the film, hence the floating memory of the scene on the truck and the post incarceration encounter at the noodle stand. The wordless exchange of gazes on the truck becomes an emblematic gesture toward reconciliation. For the unclear originator of the flashback metaphorically blurs the difference between the perpetrator and the victim. However, one cannot help but wonder if state terror like this kind can be easily forgiven by simply invoking the specter of white terror. That is, questions remain as to whether or not the soldier did indeed believe that the formation of a reading group threatened national security and whether all past roles could be simply written off as a malaise of a less democratic time. The fundamental issue raised by this scene has larger political and perhaps ethical ramifications. Can a perpetrator however minor role he plays be absorbed of his responsibility because the political climate gave him no option to follow orders. And should a film addressing atrocity promote such an approach to history. I cannot help but being reminded of a scene from Alan Husney's Night and Falk in which one after another the German SS members proclaimed that they were not responsible. Perhaps the intention here is to be inclusive in addressing issue of restitution between the perpetrators and the survivors. In this scene portraying Paul's meeting with the former soldier and the flashback of his arrest. But the encounter in a paradoxical way questioned the healing effect of memory. Memory it seems brings more suffering to Paul. In the conversation the former soldier with somewhat irrepressible pleasure reveals to Paul that he has long retired from prison command and has opened a noodle stand with his wife and daughter. He said, life isn't bad. And then he asked what about your wife? Well intentioned though it may be the question seemed thoughtless and cruel beyond description. All Paul can do is keep drinking. To be sure Paul's search for the former soldier has nothing to do with his wife and family's life. His so concerned is finding Chen's grave site so he can be rid of the guilt that has caused his self-imposed exile and tormented him for many years. Moreover, implied in the scene is also a contrast between the former perpetrator of terror and his victim. The former has his family and a humble but comfortable life while the latter lost his wife and is exchanged from a remaining family member. The recalling of the past in the scene is devoid of therapeutic power and remembrance seems only to hide in Paul's determination to locate Chen's grave. On the other hand, memory does bring deliverance for Paul when he finally locates Chen's burial site. His subconscious can conjure up the memory of his wife. Though the scene is not a flashback recollection in the strictest sense, at the end of the film, when Paul returns to his daughter's apartment after the Kendall-like episode, he collapses in the doorway. His daughter helps him to bed and finding his open diary starts to read with Paul's peaceful sleeping face serving as the backdrop. The film ends with a sepia scene of the aging Paul strolling on a breezy open field with his young wife and daughter on the either side holding hands, they work in slow motion smiling at the camera and then the frame freezes. Since it is impossible that the old Paul could exist in the same time frame with his wife and daughter when they were young, this scene can only be imaginary. The most logical explanation is that it is close stream, but it is also possible that Shoujin is imagining it upon reading her father's diary. Ultimately we must consider the final shot to be a shared and perhaps imagined memory for father and daughter. It is a memory of the past and at the same time memory for their future. In a similar fashion similar to the use of fabricated memory, Super Citizen Guo also incorporates archival footage at two critical junctures. These two segments, one from the late colonial period and the other from the early days of national's rule, share striking similarities both in their documentary nature and their function in the film. Both featuring a display of military prowess of the ruling governments, these documentary excerpts appear in a nearly seamless manner after flashbacks of former political prisoners. They create intriguing ideological interpretations of historical event and offer a personalized view of Taiwan's past by just opposing personal flashbacks of archival footage. The first archival footage appears when Guo succeeds in locating the first person implicated in the reading group, Shun, a musician who lives in a dilapidated illegal shack and earns a living by playing for funerals and weddings of life. I'm willing to talk about Chen, Zheng Yi, you'll focus instead on earlier time when Paul and You were to consummate and comrades in arms after being drafted by the Japanese colonial government to fight in the Pacific War. You then walks out into the ramshackle yard and he plays in March. With the military music playing in the background we first see a black and white scene in which You, Paul and three others from the same village, sit for a photographer before they are sent to the battlefield. At the flair of the photographer's flash, the camera cuts to documentary footage showing marching soldiers and a troop inspection by the Japanese governor general of Taiwan followed by archival films of battle scenes including death soldiers lying in trenches with the military music continuing to play but at a lower volume the camera cuts to archival footage or something looks like archival footage of Paul and another soldier possibly You arriving at a Japanese house where deceased soldiers' families need to receive their bones this mixture of historical documentary film and fictional characters flashback ends with Paul and You crying with the family as the camera cuts to the roofs of illegal thriving in Taipei of the 1990s the immediately discernible significance of this segment is the ironic effect created when the archival footage classes with the personal flashback You were sentenced to six years because he paid a visit to his old cosmic womb we can infer that You, like so many victims, the white error suffered both in prison and after his release constant harassment from local police and difficulties in finding steady employment were about two of the most common forms of persecution even after people served and deserved prison sentences it is therefore understandable that You would prefer not to discuss turn of any related matter instead he prefers to recall an earlier time when as loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor they were treated with the greatest honor of dying for the emperor the recollection of the delivery of their soldiers' bones is clearly from Paul's perspective as we see the camera zoom in in his face hence what is glorious for You represents only death in Paul's memory but the irony of the archival footage becomes even sharper when contrasted with another footage whose appearance is pregnant with ideological implications and political meanings in a scene that triggers a combination of documentary film images and personal flashbacks who goes to visit Professor Wu who puts on his headphone when Paul inquires into the whereabouts of Chen who lifts one of the earphones and hears an NT communist propaganda song then we see a black and white documentary of the double-tenth celebration with Jiang Kai-shek inspecting the troops as the trio voice continue drawn on about the importance of recovering the mainland the image of tanks displaying the political prowess of the KMT regime segue into military trucks rushing in and disgorging soldiers to arrest Guo and other members of the reading group the functions of the documentary footage are manifold first the surface and ironic reminder of the post martial law audience the absurdity that most of them lived through as argued by a film historian because the historical film by definition refers to a past reality known to most viewers prior to the film either from experience or from representation they enjoy the effect of recognition this extra reference which appeals to historical knowledge and knowledge that exists outside of the film's fictional sphere produces an additional level of meaning and increases the meaning of potential for the film end of quote moreover the documentary footage serves to highlight the damaged mental state of Wu and by extension other political prisoners most importantly it constitutes a silent accusation against the fascist state apparatus that in the name of recovering the mainland and resisting the communist hunted down and persecuting many people instilled a pervasive fear in everyone's life and destroyed people like Professor Wu Guo and many others the just position of real archival footage and the fictional depiction of Guo's arrest has a subtle lever in fact in that the real is fictionalized while the fictional gains a sense of realism as Entang Keith argues in his discussion of Vassbinder's historical film in quote the viewer senses even if unconsciously the unresolvable dual status of historical narratives as document and fiction authenticity authentically true and at the same time used within a freely invented story end of quote ultimately however super citizen quote emphasizes more the question of how real the historical footage is for as the Taiwanese who lived through the dark and the test the troop inspection was nothing but a stage display a myth of the Republic of China for all intents and purposes the archival footage is as fictional as the film in which it is used placed side by side the two excerpts of archival footage reveal startling similarities for instance the troop inspections by the governor general of colonial Taiwan Kai-shek are nearly identical with the same kind of amorphous soldiers stepping before the podium in front of the presidential palace office Taylor Downing's analysis of history on television is also appropriate here regarding footage in fictional film in the quote in newsreels public information films works of propaganda on television newscast film frequently not only captures an impression of what an event look like but gives a topical and often revealing interpretation of that event end of quote used several decades later the incorporation of the archival footage in super citizen quote presents a new interpretation that may be in direct opposition of the original intent that is the military and the governor general slash president in front of their office are both symbols of the state but for the Taiwanese the definition of state war is extremely complex complex post martial law debates over the issue of national identity often brings up the question of whether the national's government was another colonial government of the Japanese super citizen quote does not appear to throw on this question but does hint at the issue of national identity with its title citizen war mean well one does which state is being referred to in the film it would well be a declaration of political allegiance in the sense that a citizen of a given country should have the inalienable right to congregate freely to read any material he or she wishes without fear of persecution among the films that deal with acts of government brutality and suppression of dissent in Taiwan super citizen quote is to the best of my knowledge the only one in which the victim comes face to face with the member of the garrison command who carried out the arrest but the central theme of redemption overshadowed the issue of culpability to be sure we should be cognizant of this kind of justice as is explicated by Paul Benzel in a quote the punishment of perpetrators is crucial to dealing with the past but you will always be insufficient response to mass atrocity and any successful attempt to deal with the past must seek to explore other strategies to make a victim's whole and to prevent a reoccurrence of the past abuse end of quote yet quote search for truth that is the burial site of Chen unconditionally validates and legitimates the need for reconciliation hence what one sees is a tormenting of quote's conscience over unwillingly revealing Chen's name perversely quote is the guilty one he suffers years of isolation in prison and at the nursing home and his wife commits suicide here I'm reminded of London's abandoned plan to make a movie about revenge which would have likely resulted in a mental drama instead the film he eventually made uses quote's field not only as a plot device but also as a lesson in accountability quote feels guilty about revealing Chen's name and spent his post incarceration days in self reproach while the former soldier lives a guilt free life and those higher up order they arrest and execution remain completely unseen and unaffected by turning the world upside down and making the former political prisoners the guilty one the film brings a powerful indictment against the government at the end of the movie when Guo finally finds the site where Chen and others who were not identified by their families are buried he lights up the bamboo grove with candles and offers his apology to Chen Zhengyi this overriding concern with closure entails an urge to move forward and contradicts the earlier moments in the film where a painstaking effort is invested in recollecting and re-creating a memory of the white terror by saying this I'm not arguing that one must grow on the past but rather questioning where the post action in the end mirrors the tired slogan of forgiveness in a post martial law atmosphere of reconciliation rubber cheese comments can help illustrate my concern and quote super season quote in acts of cathartic closure and was lauded as being much warmer as compared with another movie by Hou Xiaoxian and hence more intimate more humane more moving and for it offers a memory that audience were more likely to identify with be moved by a scent to and remember end of quote in the audience appreciation of the film and sympathy for its intended protagonist a public memory about the white terror is formed out of quote fictional past but one must be wary of what is gained beyond knowing what happened if a fictional or cinematic work work overemphasizes closure by means of an Aristotelian formula of conflict and denouement it can degenerate into a simplistic and therapeutic feel would aid those in general or adapted triumphalism thank you very much Sylvia for really a beautifully written paper I have one comment and one question and the comment really actually is by by your speech I have always believed that the martial law acted something like to freeze social memory of Taiwan especially atrocities in terms of that kind of memory and so once the martial law was lifted is all of a sudden the frozen 40 years just become open gate and so those very old memories of 30, 40, 50 years ago become very immediate, very present and I think in Super Citizen Quo's final scene that you recall was a perfect involvement of that it was actually present and past coexisting is because of this allowance to make that become a possibility and people can reclaim their past in order to continue the present and search for future so that's my comment my question actually is coming from yesterday's Director Wan Yuan's own comment I think he was still very passionate and actually believed that Taiwan need transitional justice and was in pain that actually this wasn't achieved however I think his own film ironically probably pointed out to us how difficult to make that process is a very quick fix because if you just find safe gold is not necessarily transitional justice and probably not going to help the society move on so my question to you is what's your view on how to search or continue to search for this transitional justice for Taiwan I can't I can't give you an answer for that because I'm not a legal scholar I agree with you completely and to be honest with you I wrote this book in 2006 it was published in 2007 and because of the invitation I watched the film again I changed some of my views about almost 10 years ago and when I wrote the book and I look at the film and I saw the film many times in order to write this chapter I was more critical of the movie I feel that I didn't like the ending I thought it was too feel good but maybe after almost 10 years a decade and being older or having a distance between the book so I looked at it and I became much more sympathetic to the film and the fact that first of all you can't make a film about someone seeking revenge how would you do it? it would be just absolutely awful you find a person and then what? you want to put them in jail so the question that he raises in the movie it's more valuable than whatever he's trying to say I think he probably believes some form of justice but at the same time for him to do a film like that it would be very hard and probably would not be as valuable as what we have it's a question raised an issue so yes he did find a person but then then what? what happened next? it doesn't go anywhere and I really like the scene after 10 years when I see it again I really like that scene I thought it was really powerful so I don't have an answer but I do believe that there needs to be some form of justice and the problem with White Terror and the problem with the two to eight incident in a similar situation there was such a hurry to address the issue so a lot of time the focus was very compensation there was also the dispute or argument over which word we used do we use compensation or and they both they had very different political meanings and so but there was so much focus on how much we should compensate the family for and let's see if money could do everything and there was no accountability and then now of course another form of revision has come in we're trying to rewrite that part of the history so I think this film is still relevant in these days but I don't have an answer for you David? like me yeah I think I probably had more of a comment rather than a question I apologize I suppose the thing that really attracted me initially to this film was the representation of the 1990s the demonstrations electoral politics the way the he just can't understand what's going on in the world and I suppose once seen that I particularly I thought there was a lot of humour in the film but that was one of the things that I really enjoyed particularly the scene where the father-in-law who eventually gets arrested for political corruption gives him the credit card and the mobile phone and then of course we've got the scenes about watching the stock market so it was a nice mix of tragedy and humour so for me I think having lived through the 1990s I think it was a really nice way to think about the 1990s as well as your kind of white terror era any questions? or comments? okay as we've not had an actual question thanks Nicky, don't be funny it's okay it's very interesting I think I counted something like six or seven different forms of memory in your paper you begin with a dichotomy between a sort of habit memory and then sort of learn it but then you bring it to fabricated memory and the thing I have a puzzle with is once I think your story and the way you do a sort of narrative and an analytical narrative is very interesting and I'm not going to be quite all that the methodological question would be how are you what are you using to deconstruct and analyse this notion of fabricated memory I would have thought it was almost an impossible task you've got the fabricated memory as presented in the film itself which is your prime task but then you've got the possible conceivable real fabricated memory of actual people at that time doing the stuff so you've got it seems to me a complex methodological problem of possible alternative stories one could imagine a whole bunch of alternative stories about what the fabricated memory well the identification of fabricated memory first of all and then its interpretation you've given us a particular interpretation of that which is very interesting but what is the methodology behind that I mean could someone else come along who's trained in your area and give us a different version of the same fabricated memory once identified do you see what I'm getting at I can imagine someone else write a completely different article about it and that's why this movie is so interesting precisely because there are so many things you can talk about but Jefferson was just saying the angle the representation of Taiwan in the 1990s contrasted with the earlier period that the film implies but didn't make any kind of very overt comments on the father's inability to be incorporated into society was part of the new Taiwan that he didn't know so there are so many things in this movie that you can talk about and even with just the memory itself there are so many things you can talk about and I have to say that I use the word memory very loosely not in the sense that this is my memory or someone else's so it's more or less memory in the sense that something happens in the past whether it's real or not so it's more like a recollection rather than memory or sometimes the dream scene for instance that's really not memory per se because he obviously has dreams about it so it could be dreams it could be in a way fabricated because he could not have seen the execution so I agree with you completely you can write an article you can write an article about this bit that is completely different the opposite of what I just said and it's fine and that's why I say if you have any comments it doesn't have to be a question you have a different reading that would be wonderful because then we get more appreciation of the movie than just me talking for 45 minutes however long I took that's great anyone yes please this young lady here was here yesterday she was the third generation of the family of the victim so she's probably have a very intimate re-account of her own experience I should talk my story over I just would like to answer a question about memory during the 1950s there were two photos before and after it's killed and yeah I think this must be the last photo in the world and all this before and after photo will put on a document and send to Zhang Kaixue and Zhang Kaixue will write okay I have seen this for AV person and so I think that one because I have seen this photo I have seen at least 400 people's photo like this including my grandfather so I think that that memory about this is nearly accurate because everyone seems like that thank you well maybe I should ask a question actually I found Ian's question interesting but I felt that's the whole point of problem make it more pragmatic sorry problematic actually it is raising the question rather than giving an answer that I definitely actually when I read that chapter I really love it even though you think you change your mind but I really love that chapter and I really like the way you how you blend different scene together and how retell the story in a different way even sometimes not contradict each other consciously sometimes you know I think you did a great job there and actually if you have the chance you should read that the article is really brilliant and we got in our library but can I just ask a question because yesterday Laren did say now as a 60 years old or 60 something old year old man he felt very differently and looking back at this film he wouldn't change anything ok that's quite interesting and I was just thinking maybe aging or being a bit older also change a little bit about this kind of a tragedy or a historical event you probably have a different take on this what do you think about why you change your mind and looking back some of some part of the film still very relevant today and what's your take on that as well so why it makes it timeless there ok there are two different levels of two different approaches to answering your question what made the movie timeless I think 10 years ago I thought it was precisely because the so called more humane approach the lighting of the candles and the search I thought that was the reason why this movie could have relevance because it's easy it doesn't put you off and the movie I I mentioned later in the article like Robert T. mentioned was Good Men, Good Women Hang Nan, Hang Yun by Hou Xiaoxian and that movie is the opposite it really does try to put a distance between the audience and the film because it has a movie within the movie and I used to think that was the reason why it would have any kind of lasting power because it appealed it's more easily digestible but then when I look at it again I feel like maybe it's going to be seen again and again maybe for a very long time it's precisely because the questions that it's been raised without any kind of answer that part of the reason why I changed my mind about interpreting the whole idea of closure and in the past I faulted him for not for making a feel-good movie but now I feel like yes it's very subtle but the question is there and it's up to us the audience to get that message he's setting up the parallel between these different the victim and the victimizer and the apparatus of those behind the victimizers and how it's set up and very nicely I think for Taiwan probably that would have more lasting effect maybe one day people in Taiwan will come back to this part of the history and look at it differently and I don't know if justice could be sought by that time but still people would look at it differently also have a comment thank you very much for your speech today and I think it's particularly interesting that you mentioned at the end of your speech that your point of view about this movie changed quite even from 10 years ago you are now more sympathetic and I just experienced the total opposite process I first saw this movie 20 years ago 21st when it was first presented and back then I was really young and was totally ignorant about the past history and after a very long and sad movie I think that ending really made me feel a little bit comfort and then start personally my own research about the town history but right now after 20 years I saw this movie again and I felt how little progress we have made as a society you can see nowadays we are still arguing about the nuclear plan and we still have all those problems and we never overcome the problems of transitional justice we never asked about who did this to whom and so I think my dissatisfaction about that ending comes from my dissatisfaction about our home society I think we did truly to make progress on this history so for example I think we owe a lot of apology to Victor's family and we also have already told to think about our past and also create actively create the collective memory I think it is the never ending enterprise and so yesterday's ending really remind me that it's really feeling too good about our own society thank you I think it's very poignant in that your experience is precisely it's a very good explanation for the background of the movie I think you also mentioned a little bit earlier how at the time when the movie was made there was this need because we just came out of that period and the society itself needed that kind of consolation needed that kind of closure uplifting he found a way he was able to apologize and at least one person this conscience is clear now and that kind of feeling was very important to Taiwanese at that time I think Taiwanese at that time probably could not handle something more but as your comment shows now 20 some years later you look at you are unhappy with it you are dissatisfied because you feel like we need it more and that itself may be a very good reason or very good motivational force that some another better film could be made not better I'm sorry but a different film could be made to address that issue differently a film is also a product of his time it reflects the time the people who who made it the people who the film were made for so I think it's very your comments describe that time very nicely thank you I had a kind of follow up question that what some of you have said how both of you had reacted differently your kind of views have changed on the film one of the questions I asked last night was about to what extent have audience reactions changed over the 20 years I didn't really get much of it he said no although it's the same although I'm not really convinced that's the case if we think about it when the film comes out but we've had a decade and a half of at least some coverage of Taiwanese history and society in education so in theory then the audience should know more about this kind of background so I think it would be really interesting to actually do some kind of systematic research to see how the audiences react nowadays yesterday he said his observation mainly on going around universities I suppose that actually narrowed down what sort of people he's talking about that sort of better educated or intellectually more informed sort of audience maybe he's comparing similar sort of people rather than comparing different periods I suppose the kind of follow-up question would be to what extent have you seen a better portrayal of white terror since that film I mean initially I would think about Nampo and New Ponyo although it's coming towards the end of this period or a couple of years ago we had the Formosa Betray which was a bit of a quite a messy feeling so at least in my view that this one seems to handle that period much better but are there any other you would recommend I also have to apologize but somewhat incoherent I just got in yesterday and so is ending my I'm wiggling between two time zones so sometimes if I sound it really weird they know it's it's not because of what I drank before like sure but I do want to say something completely unrelated but I found quite relevant I once read a a sort of upbeat piece in the New York Times about how liberating it was for a a young Jewish German Jews to be living in New York he mentioned that when he was in Germany people, every time people asking about his background and then knowing that he is Jewish the German his German friends or new acquaintances would always have this momentary momentary taken back oh okay now how do I deal with this person knowing the German history and then at one point he said I don't think tiring is the right word he just felt really that he had to constantly deal with himself in a Jew living in Germany in 21st century dealing with Germans whose parents or grandparents might have persecuted the Jews so once he moved to New York besides the fact that there are a lot of Jews in New York also the fact that he never had to apologize for being a Jew in Germany again and I think the young Taiwanese reaction to his film as he described us no difference how much of that is really no difference or how much of that had to do with the fact that perhaps there is a fatigue like the young Taiwanese felt this kind of fatigue about their past so there is also a picture when you keep talking about it and to a point people just don't want to talk about it anymore they wanted to look forward instead of backwards but I don't know it has something to do with that or mainly they just become apoptetic or they whatever actually in our summer school one man lander maybe third generation apologized to be a man lander third generation one girl she is saying now I just think it is very interesting mirroring saying I am so sorry that you know I don't know what her parents did or grandparents but you know seemingly being wise bad enough thank you I hope I can be articulate enough but I do have sort of vaguely two questions one actually you also mentioned about citizen quote or actually people saying about him pursuing idealism I actually was not very satisfied with this particular description because he was really not very sure about what his idealism is and so by just reading books which were forbidden his idealism but conforming to claim that idealism in some way sort of justify that he has been imprisoned in some way because he was subversive really and I don't think that was really I think actually this particular description about his pursuing idealism in his youth itself for me is quite problematic in the film and I don't know how you view about that and secondly is actually about the 1990s I feel it is a very opaque era because my recollection again could be because of a whitewashed by the celebration of democratization so it seems to be very optimistic and now actually you see on screen and also try to remember back things actually was very opaque still very bad so I just actually wonder anybody here remember 1990s much better probably can for example a film language was abolished eventually in that particular restriction about using but sometime in the 1990s actually I'm not very sure when from the citizen world the portraition of the 1990s almost as bad as the under martial law and especially politics really really terrible so really I just not very sure how truthful that representation of the 1990s really is if anybody have any can vouch for that I guess I'll just answer the first question about idealism I think that's part of my intention or not that's one thing I found really wonderful about the movie because to me the whole problem of white terror or persecution was whether one was idealist or not was the reason to address people and try them behind closed doors and not sometimes not even telling them the family that their son or their fathers have been executed and or demand a fee to reclaim their bodies if you cannot reduce that money your family's members body would just left and bury some place you never find the body again and to use that the whole idea of reading say they're really reading Marxist thoughts and that somehow justified the government's action I think it's inexcusable to me whether they're reading or not it's besides the point it's a government a government should have never arrested and executed people in that fashion and so in the movie was Susan was he an idealist we don't know but was that important if he wasn't so for look at it differently look at that the former soldier who arrested him he seems to say that was also a very interesting scene for me because at one point he said how would you read a kind of book at a time like this and that of course that's like the 1990s perspective on that that time but at the same time he seemed to say well no you should you should not read that kind of because it prohibited so therefore you deserve to be arrested and executed I agree with you completely I think it's the only thing I think problem actually to call you idealist exactly like you said whether or not he's an idealist shouldn't be an excuse for government to do what they did so I'm on the same page but I think by calling him idealist in such a big way in some way is making him a hero which again being a victim not necessarily being a hero and so for that particular sort of branding just simply called because he's in prison and he was horrified I feel it's problematic yeah I agree completely that somehow the victims are always heroic and it's it probably makes us feel good but it doesn't help with the situation at all great oh Peter finally coming back to your title here in your view with these atrocities why terror to do that how in your view with this how can some accountability for these terrible atrocities how can you bring about such accountability because thing for society what we're seeing is there is apparently no accountability you know giving money to bereaved families to me honestly I don't like the words bereaved families because it's bereavement for the whole country whether your immediate families were victims or not the whole country whole society is a victim because you know killing what they have done we mustn't concentrate on just simply or somebody was killed and somebody's family members were killed it's not just that it goes far beyond that it goes far beyond just the immediate family it has invocation of whole Taiwanese culture geography history everything what I not very happy with in Taiwanese why such accountability there is apparently not and coming back to your title how do you in your view bring about such accountability I don't I don't think I have an answer for that I think my question my issue is more to do with how is it presented in the movie but personally I agree with you completely there was no there was I guess most important issue was how do you prosecute the people who are still living in the same society and they are very much well connected and I read someplace the writer Leong went to this masquerade with Wu Zhengwen who was part very much the head of the secret service he was completely unapologetic and being part of the well connected member of the KMT it would be impossible and then there also some school thought about accountability or even retribution is if you do that you can turn the whole society upside down and you will create something even worse and so in a way it's not that similar to what happened in China after the cultural revolution they continue to go back and live together be neighbors again even though one accused the other of something and then cause the death in another family they continue to go back and live as neighbors again and I'm not I don't entirely agree with the idea that if you try to prosecute then the society would necessarily be turned upside down because there there needs to be a level of justice but then the next question is how far can you go and you all go the way up is to Zhang Kai-shek and remember Zhang Kai-shek was a grandson was an incredibly unhappy with books pointing the finger at his father for being the one who caused all these problems and even brought a suit against the scholars who compiled the two volumes and so it would probably shake the core of the whole society so again do we look for stability and do people want that? I don't know do people really want to have the country plunge into that kind of investigation for years and I don't know but I personally I do wish there were something more substantial than this monetary compensation Dinky, yes? You may ask the question I have I have I want to kind of link to your chapter actually in the book of which we've brought today in the book that you've done around now in the book yourself you choose a different film to kind of a documentary I think the title is like Why We Can't Dance I think Why Don't We Sing But in that documentary I was just wondering because you're covering very similar themes and very ideas about how history is represented through film, that film is documentary or as we have seen in the movie yesterday so I just want you perhaps if you could just make me a free minister to talk about the differences that you found in representation of that particular period in documentary as well as the film that we saw yesterday so go introduction to your edited book really. Very good thinking Thank you very much That's a good plug with documentary film to me it's much more interesting to be honest with you here even though I wrote half of my book is about fictional films representation of electricity I think documentary film for this specific incident or for the quite era what interesting in most is what is this what purpose does it serve is it serving to so called reveal the truth so why don't we sing we have all these eye witnesses or survivors of the form of political prisoners to talk about their experience and that is probably the very first fundamental purpose of the documentary film to people telling what happened and then after you tell people what happens then your next step is to do what to give people a more accurate record of real events or to me that movie the documentary why don't we sing was also to explain to the audience why it happened but then when we are getting into the point and it's a matter of interpretation why it happened and mine I think it's a very good record with all these survivors and talking about their experience but on the other hand dissatisfaction with that movie was the fact that the group of producers had an idea that it's all about communism like these were leftist and they had all these leftist and it was not something tolerated by the the government because they're left leaning and they're promoting Marxist ideas and to me that was too narrow an approach and this kind of to go back to what I said earlier about the no government should persecute its own people like that no matter whether they are communists or not whether they are pro-communists or not they just simply what the government should be doing and the movie the documentary is a little bit too narrow in that interpretation and if you read that if you purchase the book and read the chapter in that book I also did give two different interpretations or definitions two definitions for the white era era people believe that the focus in the 1950s but for me it's all the way up to the end of martial law because if you are just focusing on the 1950s if the whole threat was plus or bit it was more or less to do with leftist, anti-communist but if you look at it even up to 1979 with the Melida movement the incident that had nothing to do with communism that was purely pro-democracy and the government persecution of the protesters are exactly the same so it's not really because of this or that but the focus is more to do with how a government deals with dissent and how much tolerance they should give to or true democracy should be open to this kind of dissent whether it is communist, marist or democracy or pro-Taiwan independence great, thank you I think we are running out of time before Nick is talking about the book let's give Dr Lee another round of applause a big round of applause