Hong Kong Movie Star Contracted to Whack Hsu Hsin-liang?

The Taipei Times came out with an interesting report that a Hong Kong movie star, Jimmy Wang (Wang Yu), has claimed that he was contacted about a murder for hire by the KMT. The intended victim was Hsu Hsin-liang, the former democracy activist and DPP Chairman, who switched sides at the end of the 1990s and now works against the DPP.

In an interview published on Monday, Wang told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper) that the KMT had asked him to assassinate Hsu, who was living in the US at the time.

Hsu fled to the US in 1979 during a security crackdown on Taiwanese independence advocates and lived there for 10 years.

It might seem weird to some readers that the KMT would use a movie star for a contract killing. Oddly, for some reason the Taipei Times did not report the all-important back story. The fact is that Jimmy Wang is reputedly a notorious gangster with longstanding connections to the Taiwan gangs, and the period in which he says he was contacted was the period in which the KMT was using gangsters to carry out hits overseas, like the killing of Henry Liu in 1984. The Taiwan News has a much richer presentation:

Hsu, whose life is full of twists and legends, was a front-runner in initiating a series of democratic movements in Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s. Wang [MT: they mean Hsu, it's a typo] joined the KMT when he studied at National Cheng Chi University. But the former KMT authority later regarded him [Hsu] as a political dissident after he insisted on running for Taoyuan County magistrate in 1977, which later triggered the Chungli Incident. Hsu was forced into a 10-year-exile in the U.S. since 1979, but he continued to push for Taiwan's democracy and anti-Kuomintang ideology by launching a weekly paper in the U.S.

Wang came into the media spotlight after his involvement in a bloody gang fight in the 1980s.

According to the Liberty Time report, Hsu's assistant on Sunday denied that he ever heard the story of the KMT giving orders to assassinate him during his stay in the U.S. But Hsu's brother, Hsu Kuo-tai, a former legislator, told local cable news station TVBS yesterday that he knew about the assassination mission. "We all knew that the KMT put Hsu Hsin-liang as the top target when he was in exile. But after the Chiang Nan murder case in 1984, the assassination mission of Hsu was canceled," Hsu Kuo-tai told TVBS.

The "Chiang Nan Murder Case," involved the political assassination of Liu Yi-liang, [MT -- Henry Liu] pen name "Chiang Nan," who published his thesis topic "The Biography of Chiang Ching-kuo" for his doctoral degree at Washington University. The publication immediately drew attention from the Military Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of Defense in Taiwan.

The bureau then came to Chen Chi-li, head of the Bamboo Union gang, and asked him to murder Liu, saying that the mission was a patriotic act. However, the KMT regime later betrayed Chen and sentenced him to life in prison after Chen successfully carried out the assassination mission.

Chen escaped to Cambodia to avoid life imprisonment and stayed there for 11 years. He never returned to Taiwan after the Chiang Nan murder case and died of cancer at the age of 66 in Hong Kong earlier this month.

Wang was quoted in the report as saying that the reason he disclosed the KMT's assassination of Hsu Hsin-liang to the media was because he owed Chen a debt of gratitude. Chen had helped Wang solve the bloody gang fight case during the early '80s.

Chen Chi-li died recently (ESWN discusses Chen's death -- scroll down to 009), and his body was returned to Taiwan amidst much gangster fanfare. Although it might seem odd that Chen Chi-li ran off to Cambodia, the country is in fact a site of operations for the Bamboo Union gang, the notorious pro-KMT gang that Chen Chi-li once headed.

[Taiwan]