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A Humane Sovereignty: Nationalist China's Public Relations Campaign in Response to the Yuyitung Affair, 1970-1972

Sat, March 18, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine, Norfolk

Abstract

On May 4, 1970, Quintin and Rizal Yuyitung, the Philippine-born publisher and editor of the Chinese Commercial News in Manila, were deported to Taiwan on trumped-up charges of publishing pro-communist propaganda. There, on August 14, they were sentenced as citizens of the Republic of China (ROC) to two and three years of "reformatory education" (ganhua) respectively, resulting in an international outcry against the ROC for violating press freedom and overreaching its "national" sovereignty.

By focusing on Taiwan's public relations campaign in defense of their deportation and sentencing, this paper argues for an understanding of the ROC based on its relations with the Chinese overseas and international civic society. At an uncertain time for Taiwan internationally, the ROC could not but try the brothers and enact its sovereignty over "Chinese nationals" abroad. By "only" meting out ganhua, it hoped to signal its receptivity to public opinion and mollify its liberal critics, particularly the International Press Institute (IPI), an organization whose membership "Free China" cherished. The IPI, however, was not pleased. Neither were hardline members of the Philippine Kuomintang, who were behind the plot against the Yuyitungs and accused Taiwan of capitulating to the world’s media. L'affaire Yuyitung, in short, is a case study in how overseas Chinese subjects figured prominently in the ROC's post-1949 efforts to represent itself to the world as a sovereign, democratic, and humane polity. Lacking territorial sovereignty over China as it had for most of its post-1911 existence, the ROC performed its "nation-state-ness" through alternative means.

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