It is dizzying progress, indeed. Green Island became a prison under the colonial rule of Japan, which saw a use for the “black tide,” a current that circles the isle and sucks flotsam back to shore. “No one has ever escaped,” says prison warden Chen Shih-chih. He recalls one 1979 attempt by an inmate who swam all night for the Taiwan coast, 20 miles distant, only to reach shore at sunup and find he was back on Green Island. At its peak under Generalissimo Chiang, the tiny jungle isle held more than 1,000 prisoners, and a fearsome reputation as the Alcatraz of Taiwan. But no more. Taiwan is a flourishing democracy, and its darkest corner is becoming a monument to its past.
Now, former political prisoners hold seats in Parliament, and they recently commissioned Chen to turn the crumbling gulag into a museum of the Chiang dictatorship, and a memorial to its victims. Down the road, at the maximum-security prison, all the big mobsters have slipped out through legal loopholes or political contacts. From a high of 178 mobsters in 1996, only five small fry are left. Chen tells this tale of two prisons as a metaphor for Taiwan’s inspiring but imperfect transition to a democracy, marred by mob influence.
Chiang Kai-shek was something of a gangster himself. After rising to power in Shanghai with the help of the notorious Green Gang, Chiang arrived on Taiwan with his defeated Nationalist Army in 1949, and immediately began jailing the Taiwanese intelligentsia. A thuggish figure who harbored literary pretensions, Chiang named his gulag “The Green Island Chalet,” as if it were a scholarly retreat. Now it is a ghostly hulk on a rocky coast, emblazoned with slogans trumpeting Chiang’s ambition to reconquer China. One cries, “Remember Chu,” a mythical little city that conquered its larger foes with guile.
Down an echoing hall where scholars once sweltered 12 to a cell in the tropical heat, a deputy warden opens the heavy metal door to No. 13, former home of Taiwanese opposition leader Shih Ming-teh. After having all his teeth knocked out by Taipei interrogators, Shih was force-fed more than 3,000 times during 13 years on Green Island, and says many ex-prisoners suffer from paranoia and nervous disorders. Guards would force inmates to dangle a straw from their mouths into a bucket of human excrement, immersing themselves in stench. This punishment the guards called “Duke Chiang Goes Fishing,” after a classic Chinese folk tale. The idea, says Shih, was to “beautify” dictatorship. He is leading the effort to document the truth in a museum.
The “chalet” was so far off-limits that even locals rarely caught a glimpse, until the generalissimo’s son, Chiang Ching Kuo, came to power in 1978. He turned on gangsters who helped his father suppress scholars during decades of “White Terror,” most notably Bamboo Union boss Chen Chi-li, who was sent to the island gulag for the murder of a dissident author. More crackdowns followed. By 1996 police choppers were flying to Green Island on televised shuttle flights, dumping mobsters by the dozen, including members of the Green Gang. It was a crazy time. Locals could now work in the prison, but many got fired for taking mob money, or selling $5 whiskey to inmates for $500. The placid isle was overrun by friends and girlfriends of the mob “big brothers” inside, flashing cash “and partying all night in the hotels,” says lifelong islander Chen Teh-hui, 44. “To be honest, a lot of people didn’t mind. The money was good.”
Too good to last. The crackdown slowed in late 1997 with the departure of tough-guy Justice Minister Liao Cheng-hao. “Most of the big-time gangsters are now back in business on Taiwan, or in exile,” says Liao, who blames the nation’s inexperience with civilian justice. Chen Chi-li jumped bail and is now working out of Vietnam. The boss of a gang called High Dignity, which extorted money from public companies, got out with a note from his doctors. Worse, says Liao, mobsters often gained folk-hero status for surviving Green Island, and many now aspire to higher office. Shih Ming-teh, one of many dissidents now in Parliament, figures he serves alongside at least four gangsters and 30 to 40 other legislators who are “connected.” All over the island, gangsters are moving into politics. Warden Chen says the few mobsters left in his prison “still get a lot of very important visitors,” including national legislators.
Green Island remains an isolation colony for intractable prisoners–mostly murderers, rapists and drug runners. The new civilian authorities have replaced military brainwashing with craft classes such as sand art. They abolished periods of indefinite isolation, and the “literary” tortures. One prisoner, in for stabbing a friend in a bar fight, says the toughest part of Green Island exile is now the first three months, when inmates wear leg irons 24 hours a day, and must master the trick of taking pants on and off over the ankle shackles. A tough-looking 22-year-old kid with a twisted upper lip, he has graduated to an unmanacled work gang and is helping renovate a grocery store on the main drag. “We don’t want to rule by fear anymore,” says Chen, whose worst-case worry is that an inmate will somehow grab a tourist’s ID and a wig to hide the prison buzz cut, and pull an escape via the local airport.
Some locals are sick of the prisons. Long ago the military confiscated land to build its gulag, and the Tsais want theirs back. But for what? Kwai Ying says penal isolation has made the island a haven for deer and rare mountain sheep, which are threatened by tourism. She would scale back on new attractions like the prison museum. That draws a scowl from her older brother Chu-Fu, who runs a scuba shop. He wants to turn prison land back to “the people,” and turn Green Island over entirely to tourism.
