<strong>Oct. 11 to Oct.17</strong>
After more than two decades of fighting the Japanese government for local autonomy, the “Taiwanese Lion” found himself running the show in 1950.
The fiery political activist Yang Chao-chia (楊肇嘉) was a 58-year-old public servant by then, serving as the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) minister of civil affairs. His nemesis, the Japanese colonial government had left at the end of World War II, and the new government had tasked him with running Taiwan’s first direct mayoral and county magistrate elections.
Yang started his career as an activist pushing for a Taiwanese representative assembly in the Japanese Diet.