S5-E13 - 1962: Taiwan’s Bloody Year You’ve Never Heard Of

THE TAIWAN HISTORY PODCAST – FORMOSA FILES

TRANSCRIPT

S5-E13 - 1962: Taiwan’s Bloody Year You’ve Never Heard Of

Release Date: May 15, 2025

Time: 28:17

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript was created by AI; it may not be entirely accurate. Any errors are the result of the AI transcription, and Formosa Files is not liable for the content in this transcript. Thank you, and use AI responsibly 😊

So, John, when would you say the world came closest to ending? Closest to ending? Well, things got pretty close after the Chicxulub impact, that massive asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico, that was about 66 million years ago, and maybe took out 70% of animal species on Earth. I wasn't there at the time though, I'm older than you, but not quite by that much. Cute.

I think the doomsday clock on our podcasting relationship just moved like three seconds closer to midnight. You know what I meant. Yeah, yeah.

Today we're talking about two incidents in Taiwan in the year 1962, so I guess you want me to say that the closest humanity came to destruction, to nuclear war, was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened in 1962. Yes, I guess I could have phrased that better. Closest humanity came to the end, yeah.

October 1962, the famous Kennedy-Khrushchev face-off. There are certainly some historians who say we were this close to Armageddon. Holding your fingers together and saying this close isn't much use to our audience.

We're podcasters, not YouTubers. But yes, yes, the prospect of full-scale nuclear war, a sobering thought. Indeed.

Our stories today, however, are not related to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but it does give us a good idea of the intense Cold War atmosphere of those years, and in 1962, a couple of really insane things happened in Taiwan as well. Yes, both these stories were new to me until preparing for this episode, and one of them, one of these stories has probably never been told in English before.

The Taiwan History Podcast, Formosa Files, is made possible through the generous sponsorship of the Frank C. Chen Foundation.

So welcome to a very strange story that didn't make it into the local newspapers, but did appear in a few scattered foreign reports. But those reports had few details.

They were just something like, a soldier in Taiwan lost a poker game and then opened fire in his army barracks. Yeah, all vague and incomplete reports, but the Chinese podcast host who does that with me and our research expert, same guy, Eric Hsu, he started looking through military court records from the time. Some of these documents, as I understand it, are written in classical Chinese, and we did manage to find what seemed to be some real information about the case.

Okay, so it's 1962, and Taiwan was pretty much a police state. It's under martial law, CKS is president. It's been about 12 years since the retreat, relocation of the Republic of China government from China to Taiwan.

The shooting war with the communists was over, but certainly wasn't some distant memory. The second Taiwan Strait crisis happened in 1958, but yeah, I see what you're getting at. Taiwan in 1962 was supposed to be, at least, a law-and-order state where laws were obeyed, or else.

Yeah, definitely not a place for any beatniks or early hippies. This is not a groovy peace and love time. No, guys who tried growing their hair out back then, the stories go, got dragged into a police station and got a head shaven.

An urban myth, perhaps. Well, okay, so, you know, 62 is too early for the real hippie movement, right? But I knew a guy who at least claimed that it happened to him in the late 70s. He and a few cool friends got a free haircut from the police, he said.

Huh, that's a nice simple community service. All kidding aside, the early 1960s was a harsh era for Taiwan. It was repressive and also quite poor.

Part of this was tight media control. Back then, all media, radios, newspapers, everything was under government control, and the censors were very busy, like all the time. They were so good at controlling the news that a story about a soldier going on a murderous rampage never leaked.

There was one other major mass murder that year that was too big to censor, or at least censor completely. Yeah, a horrific school murder case. But let's tell the soldier story first, a story most Taiwanese have almost certainly never heard of.

And the news that made it into the foreign press was just vague reports like, you said before, ROC soldier loses poker game, goes on killing spree, or shocking murder in Taiwan military camp. Not a word in the local press. And it was such a serious crime, a mass shooting in a military camp.

We did find a few short mentions overseas. I think there was something in Stars and Stripes, the American military newspaper, and then a Chinese language paper for overseas Chinese. Just a reminder that the American military were stationed here in Taiwan until 1979.

Yeah. So again, Eric Hsu, who does the Chinese podcast with me, said he still finds the whole incident a bit mysterious, as even today he can't find any firsthand reports. There are some photos of the execution, I think, and the records appear to be mostly just military tribunal archives.

Great work by Eric. Eric with an I, as opposed to you, Eryk, with a Y. Yeah, I'm deviant. Here's what we know.

The killings happened in a military camp not far from Taipei, in what's now Badu District, Taoyuan City. The few places Eric saw the name of the perpetrator, they simply said, a man by the last name Li. But in the tribunal documents, Eric found his name. The man was called, we believe, Li Wei. And as you know, two-character names are generally a sign that the person is a Waishengran, or mainlander. Mm-hmm.

He was from Yunnan. According to the records, he joined the KMT's 93rd Army, fought the communists in northeast China, and was captured by the communists in 1947. So, he was caught and then held for a time as a prisoner of war, a POW.

We don't know exactly how he got back to free China, back to the KMT. The records don't say how. Maybe he escaped, was sent to fight in Korea for the commies, was captured, and then returned to Taiwan via South Korea after the Korean War.

It's speculation, but certainly not impossible. We did a couple of episodes on Taiwan's secret involvement in the Korean War that talks about this. Yes.

Episodes about how the ROC actually prolonged the Korean War because of the Chinese POW question. And we also talked about how many of the POWs arrived in Taiwan on January 23rd. So there used to be a holiday here called 123 Freedom Day.

We can only speculate on that. And I can only also speculate on how being a POW would have affected him psychologically. But the fact would be used against him later.

You mean his captivity would be used against him after his murder spree? Yeah. The military tribunal is going to use his former POW status as a convenient answer to the whole question of motive. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

So, the crime happened around 2 a.m. on April 5th, 1962. This soldier, Li Wei, poured gasoline on a broom, set it alight, and used it as a kind of torch to set fire to the barracks. And then he opened fire on soldiers fleeing the flames.

He killed reportedly more than 10 people, at least from the records we can find. Wow. And this was over a poker game? Actually, the military records don't mention poker at all.

They say he had quote-unquote personal conflicts and got drunk, which led to the attack. But the foreign reports said he lost a poker game and snapped. Sounds like the poker story may have been a convenient narrative.

Yeah, it certainly does. I'm reminded a little of fragging, a term that comes from the Vietnam War. Unhappy U.S. soldiers throwing fragmentation grenades.

Therefore, the word fragging. There were a few of these incidents where some angry, possibly high or drunk soldiers would throw one of these grenades into a tent of a commanding officer during combat deployments. So, after he sets the barracks on fire and kills the fleeing men, he goes over to the camp headquarters and kills his superior officer too.

So that in some ways is similar to the fragging. Um, this leeway seems very likely to have been disgruntled, but the ROC military couldn't just say, oh, he was mad at a commander for, you know, duh, duh, duh, duh. They felt like they needed a reason.

I mean, he killed indiscriminately commanders, peers, and even lower ranked soldiers. It reflects rather poorly on the entire military. A drunk soldier gets angry and kills a dozen people.

Are they even supposed to be drinking in an army camp? I think that's generally frowned upon. So, no points for me guessing that this mass murderer was executed. Nope.

No points. Correct. He was sentenced to death by a military court, but then the Ministry of National Defense took it further.

They added charges of treason. Treason. Connected to him once being a prisoner of war.

They said he'd been instructed by the communists to cause chaos if the opportunity arose. The story then escalated from a poker dispute to communist sabotage. Oh, those dirty commies.

But it does seem an unlikely tale. I mean, what were his instructions from the communists? Head to Taiwan, lay low, and if the moment comes, kill a dozen soldiers. But then don't take your own life and never mention any love for Mao Zedong or Red China at your sentencing.

Yeah. Okay, well, if you put it like that, it sounds rather implausible. Yes.

It shows you just how cunning they are. I see. No, of course, the motive made little difference to Li Wei.

He still got lined up in front of a firing squad. Yeah, indeed. But it shows perhaps how less disciplined some of the military was at the time.

Eric Hsu made an interesting comment when we were talking about this in Chinese. He said that there was a drinking culture in the military due to stress, a feeling of hopelessness. You know, think about it, 1962, it had been 13 years since the KMT relocated slash fled to Taiwan.

Families are left behind. Many soldiers hadn't been able to contact family members and confirm they're still even alive. And think about these guys.

Many of these poor souls were Chinese soldiers. And one day, maybe in 1949, they're told temporary retreat to Taiwan. And then it becomes something like three years until retaking China.

And then the estimate goes up to 10 years. And now even that's gone. That's past.

Yes, that would be a heavy burden for anyone. As we often say, yeah, it's important to have compassion, not for murderers, of course, but for the suffering of people. Sometimes we forget the human stories, the pain, how both sides, Taiwanese and Chinese, endured so much suffering during that horrible part of history.

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll go as far as saying that there were certainly ROC soldiers, later veterans, who sacrificed dearly for what they thought was right, and also literally defended Taiwan from becoming, I don't know, a special administrative province of communist China. Gulp.

And the whole thing of being cut off from your loved ones and not even knowing if they're alive for decades. It's horrible. Anyway, we don't have a happy ending, do we? No.

In fact, let's move over to another sad story from 1962. But this one was widely reported in the news in Taiwan and abroad. A murder at a Taipei school.

You're talking about the Lixing High School Massacre? Taiwan's Forgotten School Shooting. Okay, here's the short version. On the morning of January 26th, 1962, the campus of Lixing High School in Yonghe, Taipei County, today's New Taipei City, became the scene of Taiwan's worst school shooting.

In less than 10 minutes, a former teacher, armed with a pistol, murdered seven people and wounded three others. It was a massacre that left the island horrified, yet over time it, I guess, not all that surprisingly faded from public memory. Lixing High School was founded in 1953 by a man called Han Kejing.

It was a modest preparatory school. Maybe you'd call it a cram school these days. Han was from China.

He had graduated from the history department of Beiping Normal University. After relocating to Taiwan in 1948, part of the exodus of over a million to Taiwan at that time, Mr. Han got rich through land transactions in Zhonghe Township. How exactly he did that isn't known, so we won't speculate.

A tiny aside for hardcore history nerds such as me, Zhonghe Township split into two in 1958, but the exact borders weren't settled until 1960. The split gave us Zhonghe and Yonghe. So, when you read about this in the old newspapers, it sometimes says, School in Zhonghe, or Zhonghe resident Mr. Han.

Uh-huh. Hopefully that will help someone win a trivia round of most obscure Taiwanese geography facts. But I kid.

It's actually a useful reminder that changes to boundaries and names over time sometimes makes history hard work. So, Mr. Han, Principal Han's little school eventually evolved into what's called Li Xing Junior High School. But it wasn't a hit.

Enrollment was poor in the early days. Then came along a hero. Well, actually he's the villain of the story, but he put Li Xing High School on the map.

A man called Cui Ying. I'm not 100% sure of the tone for that last name, the surname, Cui, Cui. It's relatively rare.

Anyway, Mr. Cui proved very good at managing athletic teams and his successes drew in students and kind of overnight Li Xing becomes a respected private institution. So, this Mr. Cui was also from the same part of China's Hebei province as Principal Han. And the two had graduated from the same school, Beiping Normal University.

“Normal” means a teaching university. Cui got his degree from the Physical Education Department. So, thanks to being a fellow alumnus and having that hometown connection with Han, Han recruited Cui in 1956 to lead the school's athletic department.

And yeah, as you said, Cui was good at his job. The school started winning multiple countrywide championships in athletics and basketball. I think their girls basketball team was one of the best in Taiwan.

So, this Cui and the school started getting a bit famous in Taiwan's sports circles. So, this Li Xing Junior High School, I don't know when exactly, I don't know when she attended, but it produced the Olympic medalist, Ji Zhen. And the Ji is like a memorial, that same character.

She became what the Taiwanese media would later call the flying antelope, I think. Ji was the first Asian female track and field athlete to win an Olympic medal. She took bronze at the 1968 Summer Games in Mexico City.

She was actually the second Taiwanese athlete to win an Olympic medal. The first to win was, of course, CK Yang, the Iron Man of Asia. He won the silver medal in the men's decathlon at the 1960 Rome Olympics.

And we did an episode on that. Oh, yes. Anyway, she and several other champions, mostly in track and field, I believe, came out of this Li Xing school.

However, Principal Han wanted Li Xing to be more than a sports school. He wanted it to be an academic powerhouse as well. And that didn't make Coach Cui very happy.

So, this Coach Cui was already known for his domineering personality, and he was constantly squabbling with Principal Han over what was more important, sports records or school grades. Finally, Principal Han had had enough of this bad-tempered but winning coach. And in June of 1960, Cui was ousted.

And as you might imagine, he didn't take that real well. Yeah, from his point of view, you can see him being upset. He's made the school.

He's probably thinking, my sports wins, what made all of this? And his haughty attitude was apparently picked up by some of his students. I've heard stuff about his athletes telling teachers, we don't need to go to your dumb math class. We're Mr. Cui's stars.

And then the teachers would be like, Coach Cui, Little Miss Chen told me to go take a hike. And Cui would defend Little Miss Chen. She thought they're winning medals.

What's more important than winning, huh? Grades. Okay, so that wasn't an actual reenactment, but you get the picture. Cui was snobby, domineering, glory hungry.

And those are not how you win friends and influence people, as I recall from reading the book. Now, as I understand it, there was a bit more shame involved than just getting fired. I've read that Cui submitted a resignation, but Principal Han neither formally accepted it nor offered to extend his contract.

So that's getting a boot and being humiliated. Yeah, I saw that as well. So, Coach Cui feels embarrassed, his reputation tarnished, his contributions dismissed, and he's seething.

According to contemporaries and also later reports, Cui swore revenge and even told close associates he would kill Han and his entire family. And of course, most people dismissed this as hyperbole, but they were wrong. And so, we move to the sad morning of January 26th, 1962.

It was the second day of midterm exams. Students were focused on their papers. Teachers were spread across classrooms, supervising the exams.

Into the school that morning walks former coach Cui, now unemployed and embittered. He's dressed neatly and carrying a concealed firearm, a military-issued 7.65mm semi-automatic pistol. The report says he entered from the back gate and politely greeted a female staff member.

The woman told him the teachers are all supervising examinations, so he says thank you and proceeds towards the administrative building. His first target was Principal Han, who was sitting at his desk. And according to some information Eric found online, Cui had disassembled a part of a garden shears, you know, those old-school tools for chopping grass or weeds, and then first stabbed Han, leaving the weapon in him before shooting and killing him.

Wow. That kind of killing shows how personal this was to him. Absolutely.

And if he had stopped there, it might be quote-unquote forgiven. You know, one angry guy kills a former boss who humiliated him. But he doesn't stop.

He then kills several teachers. These are his former colleagues. They're coming into the office to help Han.

Then comes the unforgivable part that has me as an anti-death penalty guy wondering if maybe there should be some exceptions. Cui goes across the schoolyard to Han's house to kill Han's wife. She's at the door with her 10-year-old kid, her son, and a rickshaw driver.

So, Cui shoots and kills both Han's wife and this 100% innocent poor rickshaw driver. But the 10-year-old son is a quick thinker, and he manages to escape into a crowd or something. We wish we could say the police showed up and that horrible day ended then, but that's not what happened.

Cui goes back to the school, methodically seeking out his former colleagues. And worse. Oh, so much worse.

Cui knows that Han has a daughter at the school, but it's been a few years since he's seen her. So, he goes classroom to classroom, but he can't identify her. Then he steps into one classroom and the female teacher says, excuse me, we're conducting exams now.

Please leave. So, he shoots and kills her. Three female students are also wounded in the gunfire, perhaps shrapnel or something.

But happily, they all survived. Witnesses would later recount how Cui appeared eerily calm after the shooting. He just walks across the schoolyard, pulls back the pistol slide to inspect the chamber, and leaves.

So, a question, where are the police? Yeah, I ask the exact same question. Neither Eric nor I could find a lot about the police response, but Eric did find one report saying a staff member called the police immediately, but they didn't pick up the phone. And then some other teacher had to run out and stop a patrolling police officer.

And then I did see this picture from 1962 connected to this case, and it showed police officers on a bicycle. So, I guess perhaps the response was a little slow. I've lost track of the fatalities.

How many were killed? As I understand it, in total, there were seven dead, including Han and his wife, plus three wounded, those three female students. The story doesn't end there. What followed has got to be one of the most bizarre getaways in Taiwanese criminal history.

Yeah. So, he leaves the scene of the crime, and this coach Cui hails a taxi and goes to Jinmei. You know, that area now is a really popular part of Taipei.

He unsuccessfully tries to contact a former associate, and then heads over to a place he spent plenty of time at with other educators. That would be the National Taiwan University, NTU. He's still as calm as a cucumber.

Just before entering NTU, he is said to have pawned a sweater for 50NT, eaten a meal, and then visited the physical education department, where he sought out a professor he knew. Alarmed by the sudden appearance of coach Cui, whose name and face were already on the news, this professor discreetly leaves the office to call the police. Cui waits, and then can't find the professor, so he... Let me guess.

He turns himself into the police like a gentleman. Uh, no. He stays on the campus and goes over to watch a basketball game.

Bizarre. So finally, 6.50pm, officers arrested Cui near Jianguo South Road in Taipei. He's still calm.

Eric found a report saying he told the cops, Hey, no need to get rough with me. I'll come willingly. I'm a highly educated, civilized man.

Highly educated, civilized. Well, he should know what's awaiting him. Uh, yes.

And Taiwan's legal system moved very fast. The trial was pretty swift. Now, I don't think this is right, in the sense of I don't think this should have been done.

I don't think it's the right thing to do. But due to the shocking nature of the crime, the Taipei Bar Association refused to assign him a defense attorney. I think lawyers are supposed to put personal feelings aside.

That's how it's supposed to be. But perhaps back then it would have been too much of a negative association for any lawyer and his family to suffer. Yeah, perhaps.

So, during his trial, or actually trials, because I saw in one place he went through three, Cui neither denied his actions nor expressed remorse. And this calm and unrepentant demeanor was deeply disturbing to the Taiwan public. His replies were basically; I made the school great.

They took it from me. They got what they deserved. So unsurprisingly, the court sentenced him to death, and he was executed by firing squad later that year.

Didn't he ask for a delay in his execution? He did. He wanted to wait until one of his former star athletes competed in an upcoming game held in Indonesia. So, he's like, um, can we pause the whole firing squad thing until after I see the score of my former pupil? And the authorities were, um, no.

That's crazy. I mean, you wouldn't write that in a script for a movie. Yeah.

Oh, well, we like to go out on happy endings on happy notes, but this episode, it's a hard one. The Lixing High School massacre really shook Taiwan at a time when school shootings anywhere in the world were virtually unheard of. And thankfully, Taiwan hasn't seen a repeat since.

And the killings did spark island-wide debate over Taiwan's rigid educational hierarchy. But debate is something changes another. Exactly.

The education system was, in my opinion, and still is, very slow to implement concrete reforms. It's possibly one of the biggest weaknesses or downsides about Taiwan. And the 1960s, China and the Cold War, threats, things to worry about, busy times, right? So, within a decade, the massacre pretty much disappeared from memory.

I don't even think it's in many history textbooks. Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of this case in terms of wider culture. I mean, sport was not a big deal for Taiwanese at the time, was it? I mean, parents didn't really want their kids doing sport.

Same now. The pressure has always been on grades. And yeah, that's a constant, isn't it? Insane pressure to succeed.

“You got 98 on your chemistry test. What's wrong with you?” Unfortunately, I've actually heard that. Likewise.

Okay, well, if we want some positives, at least that militaristic element that used to be at schools where they even had like a police officer. Yes, military officers. Yes, yes.

And also, the use of corporal punishment, physical punishment. That's pretty much gone. Unfortunately, yes.

Hey. Edit that out, edit that out. Just like nuclear weapons, kept as an option, okay? I see, yes.

Early on in the episode, I think you called it a forgotten tragedy. That's the part I think makes me the saddest. No plaques, no memorials, not even at the site.

This Lixing High School eventually moved away, changed its name. I think very few Taiwanese under the age of 40 have even heard of the incident. And unlike mass shootings in the US where victims' names are etched into public memory and all commemorations, this massacre has been basically erased.

Yeah, it's amazing. We know Taiwan had an authoritarian government and they only wanted to tell good news stories, but there was still quite a vibrant media, newspapers and magazines. But yeah, obviously they could stamp out this kind of story and school officials would have wanted to protect the reputations of themselves, their institutions and the families of the victims.

Yeah, probably also prefer just to try and forget about it. But hey, we're moving back into sadness territory. We're trying to end on a high note.

Okay, okay, my bad. All right, the best thing I can think of, it hasn't happened again. True.

Yes, that's a major positive. Okay, thanks for listening. I'm John Ross.

I'm Eryk Michael Smith. Bye.