Beginning around 1945, the GMD stopped dismissing human rights as inappropriate to China and took an active part in international work on human rights in the UN. Despite this rhetorical support, however, human rights violations, including arrests of suspected Communist supporters and political opponents, and closures of journals and magazines critical of the regime, frequently occurred up to the lifting of martial law in 1987. But since human rights now was a legitimate idea—especially so since Taiwan identified itself with the so-called Free World—it became an effective political weapon that critics could wield against the regime. The magazine Ziyou Zhongguo (Free China Review), founded by Hu Shi, Lei Zhen, Yin Haiguang, and others in 1949, is a good example of such an approach. The magazine was the main vehicle for liberal intellectual and political debate in Taiwan during the 1950s, but was forced to close down in 1960 when Lei Zhen was arrested and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for having harbored plans to set up a political party. Articles touching upon the subject of human rights and individual freedom appeared from the start in the magazine. They include both theoretical and historical articles, as well as articles on more political and concrete issues. The Free China people criticized the GMD’s sincerity about building democracy and respecting human rights, and argued that one could not fight dictatorship with dictatorship. In the struggle against communism, the regime should uphold freedom and democracy, since if this was its goal and what distinguished it from the Communists, it could not, as Yin Haiguang perceptively argues in the article translated here, violate its own goals and principles. The magazine was fiercely anti-Communist, but fighting communism was not its only goal: ultimately, it sought a democratic society in which people enjoyed extensive political and economic rights and freedoms.
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