The Henry Liu Case

How a bungled hit led to Taiwan's democratic reforms

Chinese leaders have never liked unauthorized biographies which reveal too much about their private lives. They frequently need to make a judgment call: Is drawing attention to the author worth all the trouble, when most people will ignore the biography?

In 1984, Taiwan was still under martial law, and the PRC had just started to open up. In 1979, the US formally established relations with the PRC, recognizing it as the sole legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan. Reagan was President in the US, and even though he had a reputation as an anti-Communist, even he wanted good relations with the PRC. Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek, who had died in 1975, was President of the Republic of China in Taiwan. Everyone could see that there was no chance for the Republic of China government returning to rule in mainland China, but Taiwan's democratic reforms had not yet started.

Henry Liu 江南 was a Taiwan-based journalist who had emigrated to the US, and had done contract work with the State Department as an interpreter. He lived in Daly City, south of San Franciso, and owned two gift shops. In 1984, he was also in the process of researching and publishing an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo. Taiwan's military intelligence learned of this, and contacted him to learn about what would go into the biography; they wanted to avoid revelations about Chiang's private life, especially the revelation that he had an affair with a married woman which had produced twin sons. The head of Taiwan's military intelligence, Wang Hsi-ling 汪希苓, was convinced that Henry Liu was lying about his true intentions, and moved to have Henry Liu killed in Daly City, at his home. 

Wang contracted out the killing to a Taiwan triad, the Bamboo Union 竹联帮, which was a major triad composed of mainland Chinese refugees who escaped to Taiwan before 1949, and were strongly anti-Communist. Wang's Bamboo Union contact was Chen Chi-li 陈启礼。Wang offered to pay the hit squad US$20,000 each for the hit, but they refused the money because they considered it a patriotic action against Communists. Chen assembled a hit squad of three men, who flew from Taiwan to San Francisco. On October 15, 1984, they killed Henry Liu in the garage of his Daly City home. Following the murder, Chen read news coverage of the murder, and discovered that Henry Liu was not, in fact, a Communist sympathizer. Feeling duped, he then recorded a confession of his actions and motivation. 

The Daly City police soon realized that they had more than a simple murder on their hands, and this drew in the FBI. The FBI soon discovered this was a political assassination, which put the ROC government in Taipei in a dilemma with their single strongest ally. Henry Liu was a naturalized US citizen, and the US government rightly took a very dim view of a foreign-sanctioned killing of a US citizen on US soil. The ROC government had to issue an official denial that this was a sanctioned hit, and Wang Hsi-ling was arrested, along with two other military intelligence officials. They confessed that this was an unofficial hit, and were sentenced to prison. At the same time, the ROC government had no interest in any of these officials appearing in a public US trial, where they would have no control over what would be revealed. The stalemate reached to the US House of Representatives, which passed a non-binding resolution in 1985 that they be handed over to the US for trial.

Wang Hsi-ling and his two associates were tried by a military tribunal and sentenced; they served 2-7 years in jail in Taiwan. The only conspirator to stand trial in the US was Tung Kuei-sen 董桂森, he was sentenced to 27 years in jail and was stabbed to death in prison in 1991.

The long-term effects were that the authority of the ruling KMT 国民党 was weakened in Taiwan, paving the way for the lifting of martial law in 1987, and Chiang Ching-kuo lifted the restriction on mainland Chinese in Taiwan traveling to the PRC. At the same time, the Democratic Progressive Party was founded to push for democracy in Taiwan. In January 1988 Chiang Ching-kuo died, and he was replaced by his vice-president, Lee Teng-huei, who was the first native Taiwanese president of the ROC. In 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential elections, which Lee Teng-huei won. Since then, only one mainland Chinese, Ma Ying-jeou, has been elected as President (2008 - 2016); all of the other Presidents have been native Taiwanese. Taiwan society has undergone a kind of localization through democracy, and even though the official name is still Republic of China, the drean of returning to the mainland is just that, a dead dream. Now, Taiwan officials hardly ever refer to their own government as the Republic of China, instead preferring to call it Taiwan.