Chiang Wei-shui

Who is Chiang Wei-shui?

Chiang Wei-shui was born in Yilan during the early years of Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan and trained as a physician at the Taiwan Governor-General's Medical School, the forerunner of National Taiwan University College of Medicine, before opening a clinic in Taipei. Frustrated by the political and cultural restrictions placed on Taiwanese under colonial administration, he turned from private medicine to public activism, founding the Taiwanese Cultural Association in 1921 to promote literacy, lectures, and civic awareness as tools of nonviolent resistance. He later co-founded the Taiwan People's Party, the first legal political party organized by Taiwanese under Japanese rule, campaigning for local self-government and for the rights of workers and farmers. He was best known for an essay likening colonial Taiwan to a patient, diagnosing the island's ailments as ignorance and lack of education, and prescribing schooling, newspapers, and public assembly as the cure. He died of typhoid fever in 1931 at the age of thirty-nine, and is widely remembered as a founding figure of Taiwan's modern social and civil rights movement.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Chiang Wei-shui" · Taiwan Panorama, features on the Taiwanese Cultural Association · National Museum of Taiwan History, colonial-era social movement archives