She was just a Formosan peasant's daughter, but she had been beautiful in her youth, when she went to Shanghai in the '20s and studied Communism. Now, at 46, after some advanced studies in Moscow and nine years in Jap prisons, she was tuberculous and no longer beautiful. But baggy-eyed, jug-eared Chinese General Chen Yi, looking back on the worst month of his Formosa governorship, would never forget the woman known as Hsieh Hsüeh-hung—Thanks Snow Red.
Chen blamed last month's Formosa rebellion on Snow Red. This was unduly modest of him; most of the trouble had been made by Chen and his postliberation carpetbaggers from the mainland.
Snow Red, as president of her local Women's Association, had made anti-Chen speeches but—said those who knew her—"she didn't sound like a Communist." Chen admitted last week: "Before the trouble started, the Communists were not well organized, but after it started they seized their opportunities."
How to Make Reds. When Chinese rule returned to Formosa (ending Japanese possession since 1895), 64-year-old Chen had seized an opportunity himself. With his Chinese aides and "monopoly police" he took over and expanded the Japanese system of government industrial and trade monopoly (sugar, camphor, tea, paper, chemicals, oil refining, cement). He confiscated some 500 Jap-owned factories and mines, tens of thousands of houses. As the Shanghai newspaper Wen Hui Pao remarked, he ran everything "from the hotel to the night-soil business." The Formosans felt like colonial stepchildren rather than long-lost sons of Han.
One pleasant evening a truckload of monopoly police cruised down the main streets of Formosa's capital, Taipeh, hunting monopoly violators. They piled out, clubbed a woman who had been hawking cigarets. (This was against Chen's law, which said that Formosans could smoke only Formosa-made cigarets—from his gang's factory.) A crowd gathered. A policeman fired. The crowd chased off the police, burned their truck.
Next day Chen's gendarmes fired on a crowd of demonstrators carrying placards, killed four, wounded eleven. The rebellion was on. Crowds seized mainlanders, beat some to death with two-by-fours. They set up a People's Purge Committee. Moderates in the Committee—like the tea merchant Wang Tien-teng—broadcast middle-of-the-road demands: election of mayors; public enterprises to be run by Formosans; abolition of monopolies. Said Wang: "We do not request independence. We support the Central Government and we love our motherland."
But Snow Red and plenty of other Formosans at Taichu (five hours south of the capital) wanted more than that. She took over as chairman of the Taichu branch of the rebellion; her followers disarmed the local police, held the town for ten days. The People's Purge Committee added 32 new demands. Samples: an autonomous constitution, the surrender of monopoly controls to islanders. Some rebels even talked of a U.S. protectorate. In Pingtung, a band of them sang The Star-Spangled Banner as they took over the town.