Word: chiangs
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...Shih, China's most eminent scholar and a former Chinese Nationalist Ambassador to the U.S., bustled between Washington and New York, demanding an open civil trial for Lei Chen. Dr. Hu is a close friend of Chiang Kaishek, but at the same time he is also a leading exponent of Formosa's need for a responsible opposition. Other overseas Chinese took up the cudgels. In Hong Kong the British-owned China Mail said angrily that Lei's arrest proved that "free speech is as dangerous in Formosa as it was shown to be during the Hundred Flowers...
Since the Chinese Reds drove his armies from the mainland, Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists have conscientiously tried to assume the trappings of liberal democracy. In Formosa the Nationalists paid new heed to China's 1946 constitution, which guarantees citizens a free press, free speech and free elections. They set up two "opposition" parties, whose candidates are sometimes allowed to beat out those of Chiang Kai-shek's ruling Kuomintang. But somehow, the vast majority of elective jobs are always won by the Kuomintang, and the opposition parties are careful not to oppose so vigorously...
...Lighthouse Builders. One of the most vocal critics of this state of affairs is bald, hulking Lei Chen, 63, publisher of Taipei's struggling (circ. 23,000) Free China Fortnightly. Lei, who joined Chiang's Kuomintang as a youth of 20, served as a Cabinet minister in several Nationalist governments, but was ousted from the party in 1954 either because he was implicated in smuggling (government version) or because he printed criticism of the government in his magazine (Lei's version). Since then, Lei and his editors have ceaselessly berated Nationalist China's "one-party dictatorship...
...last week, security police bustled into Lei's suburban Taipei home and hauled the publisher off to face a military court on charges of sedition. Though the Nationalist government insisted that Lei had not been arrested for trying to organize an opposition, the cops (who are bossed by Chiang Kai-shek's son, Moscow-educated Lieut. General Chiang Ching-kuo) were careful to take with them membership lists of the China Democratic Party. Lei's crime, the authorities declared, had been to publish in his magazine articles "defaming the chief of state, creating a feeling of hostility...
...hitherto been a relatively obscure figure, found himself famous overnight throughout Formosa and in Chinese colonies abroad. Respected Scholar Hu Shih came to Lei's defense, called him "a patriotic man and certainly an anti-Communist." From the publisher of San Francisco's Chinese World, President Chiang Kai-shek received a cable deploring Lei's arrest as "one of the great mistakes of your career." And even within Chiang's government there were those who doubted the wis dom of the move. For by this blunder, the Nationalists stood to jeopardize much of the sympathy Chiang...