Lin Yi-hsiung

Lin Yi-hsiung at an event for the direct election of the president, April 19, 1992.

Lin Yi-hsiung ( Chinese  林義雄 , Pinyin Lín Yìxióng ; born August 24, 1941 in Wujie Township , Ilan County , Taiwan ) is a former politician and chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of Taiwan. In the 1970s he became involved in the Dangwai movement, which opposed the one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang government, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison following the Kaohsiung incident .

Early political activity

After graduating from Taiwan National University with a law degree in 1964, Lin became a lawyer. He came into contact with politics when he worked as a lawyer for opposition activist Kuo Yu-hsin in 1976, who had sued the ruling Kuomintang party for electoral fraud. In 1977, Lin was elected to the Taiwan Provincial Assembly in Kuo's former constituency of Ilan .

In 1979 Lin took part in the newly founded opposition magazine "Formosa". After a pro-democracy rally organized by the magazine and clashes with the police on December 10, 1979, the Kaohsiung incident , Lin was arrested along with other prominent dissidents (collectively known as the "Eight of Kaohsiung") and passed by a military tribunal in April 1980 sentenced to a prison term of 12 years.

Murders of the Lin Family

When Lin Yi-hsiung was mistreated in prison, his wife, who was visiting him, called for help on February 27, 1980 at the Amnesty International office in Osaka . The next day, Lin's mother and two seven-year-old twin daughters were stabbed to death by strangers in their home. Lin's eldest daughter Lin Ting-chun (林亭 均), nine years old at the time, survived the massacre, injured by six knife wounds. Lin's wife, who was not at home at the time of the crime, also escaped the attack. The authorities said they knew nothing about the crime, although the family home was under police surveillance for 24 hours at the time of the crime. The murders of the Lin family, reported both in Taiwan and abroad, caused bitterness and indignation.

Study visits and political career

In 1984, Lin was paroled and went to the United States, where he enrolled at Harvard University and earned a master's degree in public administration in 1987. Studies at the universities of Cambridge and Tsukuba (Japan) followed.

In 1989, Lin returned to Taiwan and established the Chilin Foundation for Civic Education. Together with Shih Ming-teh and Hsu Hsin-liang , he organized a campaign in 1992, in which the direct and free election of the President of Taiwan was called for. In 1994 he joined the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and in 1995 took part in the party's internal primaries to determine its candidate for the 1996 presidential election, but could not prevail.

In 1998, Lin was elected the 8th DPP party chairman and supported DPP candidate Chen Shui-bian in the 2000 presidential election. After Chen was elected president in May 2000, Lin retired from his position as party chairman by pretending to be to a poem by Robert Frost stated that he would "rather go the less traveled paths".

Resignation

In the election of the chairman of the DPP in January 2006, Lin supported the candidate Wong Chin-chu , who sought internal party reforms. Wong won less than 10% of the vote and was clearly defeated by President Chen's favorite candidate Yu Shyi-kun . Only a few days later, Lin announced that he was leaving the DPP. He criticized the fact that in the end the party had only gotten entangled in internal rifts and that the national elections had only led to deepening the differences between the ethnic groups in Taiwan. He therefore sees no point in remaining in the party, let alone working in any capacity for the party.

Nevertheless, as a non-party, Lin continued to support former party comrades, such as Frank Hsieh and Chen Chu in the mayoral election campaigns for Taipei and Kaohsiung in 2006 and Tsai Ing-wen , the DPP candidate in the 2012 presidential election, as the DPP in his opinion is still the most progressive party in Taiwan.

Commitment to nuclear power

Lin Yi-hsiung has been involved in civil movements against nuclear power since the 1990s. Repeatedly he took part in demonstrations against the controversial Taiwanese nuclear power plant number 4 and called for a referendum on the question of the commissioning of the power plant. On April 22, 2014, Lin went on a week-long hunger strike, which he ended after the government announced that it would stop construction on the power plant for the time being.

Web links

http://chilin.typepad.com/founder/5/ Short biography on the Chilin Foundation website (Chinese)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ http://www.taiwandc.org/twcom/tc18-int.pdf
2. ↑ http://www.judylinton.com/judytest.html
3. ↑ Loa Iok-sin: The 228 Incident: Lin I-hsiung's family tragedy commemorated. Taipei Times, March 1, 2013, accessed August 24, 2019 . 
4. ↑ http://chilin.typepad.com/founder/5/
5. ↑ http://dailynews.sina.com/bg/tw/phoenixtv/file/20060124/01191071338.html
6. ↑ Taipeitimes.com
7. ↑ http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2003/03/24/199294
8. ↑ http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aipl/201404300014.aspx Focus Taiwan, April 30, 2014

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Lin is the family name here, Yi-hsiung is the first name.