Empire’s Borders II－Western Enterprises, Inc.
2010
35mm transferred to Blu-ray disc．black & white．sound．three-channel video
(70’ 12” single-channel & 5’ 45” of double-channel) + documentation
Artwork Context and Introduction
In recent years a large amount of propaganda has been produced in Taiwan in the name of revisiting history. Generated by the American Institute in Taiwan, the Taiwan Government, and research centers at major universities, this propaganda has focused on repackaging the United States’ domination of political, economic and cultural structures in Taiwan from 1950 to 1979 as a central enabling factor in Taiwan’s path to modernization and economic maturity. Using television, newspapers, books, documentaries, and art exhibitions, these organizations have presented carefully selected historical data, nostalgic artifacts, stories, and warmhearted testimonials told by Taiwanese agents of the U.S. during this period of domination to refashion it as a fondly remembered era.
When imperial and state apparatuses administer projects re-coding historical memories, they not only secure the right of historical revision to construct the legitimacy of their ruling authority, but also revise the structure of desire, ways of thinking, and life values in individuals.
Reading the people’s history,(1) we discover that 1950 to 1979 in Taiwan was not necessarily a fondly remembered era. After the Korean War erupted in 1950, the United States, which had discontinued support for Kuomintang forces in the final stages of the Chinese Civil War, dispatched the Seventh Fleet to blockade the Taiwan Strait and maintain U.S. hegemony in the Pacific region. Also, to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from deploying PLA forces to the Korean battlefield, the CIA reestablished cooperation with the Kuomintang Government, which was now based in Taiwan following their retreat from the Mainland. One cooperative venture between the CIA and Kuomintang was a non-governmental trade organization designated as Western Enterprises,(2) which established the Anti-Communist National Salvation Army (NSA) specifically to launch a surprise attack on the Mainland and harass its coastal areas.(3)
Under the Sino-American Mutual Defense Treaty of 1954 to 1979, the United States supported the Kuomintang dictatorship, whose anti-communist, martial law mechanisms (1949—1987) completely suppressed leftist factions and political dissidents in Taiwan.(4) Furthermore, through the U.S.-guided Treaty of San Francisco (1951), the sovereignty of Taiwan was left undecided, resulting in its status as a state of exception. Again, under the U.S. policies of military and economic aid from 1951 to 1965, Taiwan was reorganized into a logistics base for the U.S. military and a zone for low-cost, polluting, and labor intensive industries in the international capitalist system of divided labor. Following the brainwashing by Kuomintang anti-communist education and U.S. Cold War cultural propaganda, Taiwan became a pro-U.S., anti-communist base, and a capitalist society.
Following China’s 1978 economic reforms, the United States formally acknowledged the PRC’s sovereignty over China on January 1st, 1979. At the same time, the United States Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, breaking off diplomatic relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan), thus again rendering it a state of exception, much like a territorial possession of the U.S. In 1984, Taiwan stepped up its neoliberal policies of liberalization, internationalization, and systematization in response to the formidable pressure of U.S. trade reprisals. In 1987, following the end of the Cold War, pressure on Taiwan to fully liberalize and open its markets to the U.S., and continual protests calling for democracy in Taiwan, the Kuomintang put an end to thirty-eight years of martial law.
Following the U.S. led founding of the World Trade Organization in 1995, Taiwan, which had been subject to U.S. discipline, administration, and domination for so long, joined the organization in 2002, becoming a subordinate region in the system of globalized neoliberal capitalism. Under the long-term re-coding of historical memories by imperial and state apparatuses, Taiwanese society has had its local history of dissent, social context, and popular imagination eviscerated.
The inspiration for Empire’s Borders II–Western Enterprises, Inc. came from the experiences of Chen Chieh-jen’s father, who was a member of NSA. When he passed away in 2006, he left behind a partially fictionalized autobiography, a paper listing NSA soldiers lost at sea in a raid on the Mainland, an old military uniform, and an empty photo album. This photo album had once contained pictures of Chen’s father and NSA soldiers being trained by Western Enterprises, but at some point Chen’s father had burned them.
In this video Chen Chieh-jen uses a poetic dialectic to transform the building that housed Western Enterprises(5)─a place full of imperialistic overtones─into a symbolic labyrinth embodying sixty years of post-war Taiwanese history, and a wasteland reflecting the amnesia of the Taiwanese people.
In the video, a son reexamines items like those Chen’s father left behind: an empty photo album which cannot testify to history, a real but impossible to verify list of NSA soldiers lost at sea, a partially fictionalized autobiography written as self examination, and an old military uniform. The son marks the anniversary of his father’s death by burning spirit money and then putting on the uniform amidst the drifting and curling smoke─unifying his image with that of his father’s─to make the journey back to Western Enterprises.
The son, now portraying the father, wanders through different areas of the abandoned Western Enterprises facility which is permeated with traces of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG).(6) On different floors of the building he meets an NSA soldier unsuccessfully searching for his own military dossier, two undocumented victims of white terror who cannot leave the building, and unemployed laborers and day workers trapped by abandoned industrial equipment.(7) These people and ghosts excluded by the historical views of imperial and state apparatuses next help one another to the MAAG auditorium in the Western Enterprises building and assemble on the stage as if they are about to start a people’s memory and imagination demonstration to confront the oppression of historical views of imperial and state apparatuses.(8)
Although the existence of the Western Enterprises headquarters is historically factual, there is no photographic record of the building. The building used in the video is actually a chemical factory that was active in the 1950s during the period of U.S. aid. Scenes meant to symbolize various historical periods were created by Chen Chieh-jen, actors, and workers using objects left in this abandoned building.
Central News Agency of Taiwan: “New Life lined up to welcome domestic and foreign reporters.” Photographer: CNA reporter Shen Xinnan, April 25, 1954. Photograph: Central News Agency.
Note: The term “New Life” here refers to the New Life Correction Center on Green Island, Taiwan, which housed political prisoners. According to other photos taken on the same day by the CNA, the Western officer in the photo is an advisor from the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group whose name can be transliterated from the Chinese as Colonel Camonto.
Low-ranking officers of the Anti-Communist National Salvation Army, including Chen Chieh-jen’s father, taken in the early 1950s by an unknown photographer.
Chen Chia-he (陳嘉禾) entrusted Chen Chieh-jen’s father with personal effects, including a photograph of his recently-born child, before he set out on a mission that proved fatal.
Notes
- For examples of Taiwan’s history from the perspective of the people’s memory, see the writings of labor activists collected in Taiwan Economic History for Workers published by the Labor Affairs Bureau of Kaohsiung City Government.
- Western Enterprises was under the jurisdiction of the Office of Policy Coordination, which was part of the CIA’s global underground operations and established in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in February of 1951. The headquarters of Western Enterprises was located on Zhongshan North Road in Taipei City, near the current location of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, while operations bases were located on the outlying islands of Matsu and Kinmen. In 1955, after Western Enterprises ceased this stage of its operations, the CIA continued to operate in Taiwan under another name.
- This sentence mainly refers to the fact that the NSA, jointly established by Western Enterprises and the Kuomintang Government in 1951, had the primary mission of launching military attacks and interference against Mainland China during the Korean War, yet the U.S. and KMT governments have never publicly acknowledged that the NSA was once a legitimate organization. Mid and lower level members of the NSA were mostly young men recruited from poor farming and fishing families that had originated in Mainland China. These soldiers received no salary for the period they served, and as of 2011, nearly sixty years after the fact, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense still refused to pay wages, claiming that NSA records were incomplete. In 2013, after many of those rank-and-file members of the organization had grown old, an entry on Wikipedia for the NSA appeared. Information on this page was obviously based on official government records yet fails to mention the dominant role played by Western Enterprises in the establishment of the NSA as well as the perspective of its members. Please see: https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/反共救國軍 [Accessed May 10, 2024]
- All cases regarding victims of white terror during Taiwan’s Martial Law era have yet to be resolved. According to official government estimates, approximately eight thousand victims were murdered, and another one hundred and forty to two hundred thousand victims were sentenced or imprisoned by military courts for political reasons.
- An image of the Western Enterprises headquarters had not been released to the public before filming was completed. For this reason, the building depicted in the film is not the real headquarters, and its image is intended to represent the United States’ near complete control over all aspects of Taiwan.
- The primary missions of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group were to establish a mechanism that supervised the political, military, and financial affairs of Taiwan, and carry out military deployments advantageous to the U.S.
- The actors in the video are factory and temporary workers who lost their jobs as a direct result of neoliberal policies enacted by the Taiwanese government, and members of the National Alliance Federation of Independent Trade Unions, a union which is not registered with the government.
- In addition to the main film of this three-channel video installation, two other short films are projected. The film on the right shows unnamed mid and lower level NSA soldiers, and the film on the left contains portraits of victims of white terror.