Written by Andrew Morris.
Image credit: MiG-19 3171 piloted by Fan Yuanyan by 玄史生. / Wikimedia, license: CC BY-SA 3.0.
In November 2023, I was very honoured to learn that my 2019 article “‘Praising Righteous Fan’: PLA Air Force Commander Fan Yuanyan’s 1977 Defection to Taiwan” had been named a winner of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (IJTS) Open Access Award. And this January, I was honoured again to be asked to look back at that article for this upcoming special issue of Taiwan Insight. My IJTS article was the product of a larger 11-year research project that was very enjoyable; it represented a significant turn for me, and it was gratifying for me to learn that it was well received.
My PhD from the University of California, San Diego, was earned in the field of modern Chinese history. My dissertation, which evolved into my first monograph, was on the topic of sport and physical culture in China from the late Qing through the Republican era. By the time that book was published in 2004, however, I had already taken on a Taiwanese history research agenda. That same year, a volume that I co-edited with Taiwan anthropologists David Jordan and Marc Moskowitz, The Minor Arts of Daily Life: Popular Culture in Taiwan, was published by the University of Hawai‘i Press. That volume included an article I wrote about the history of baseball in Taiwan. This piece, in turn, would grow into a monograph on the topic titled Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (University of California Press, 2010). This project necessitated a deep engagement with Taiwan’s 50-year history as a colony of Japan – who brought baseball to Taiwan – and also Taiwan’s longer history as a former colony that preserved many cultural links (like baseball) with their former colonizers. That consideration of colonial history and postcolonial nostalgia was the motivation for another edited volume titled Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). And this intellectual project to understand the lasting postcolonial ties between Taiwan and Japan perhaps can be seen to have come full circle when Maruyama Masaru, translator of works by Immanuel Wallerstein and Henry Kissinger, translated my Taiwan baseball book as Taiwan yakyū no bunkashi (A cultural history of Taiwan baseball) for Tokyo’s Ronsosha in 2022.
It should be clear that, besides being fundamentally interesting, this general field of Taiwanese-Japanese historical ties has a specific resonance in Taiwanese society and politics and has become a favoured topic in the discipline of Taiwan. It may have been an impatience with this dominant trend with regard to what constitutes proper “Taiwanese history,” then, that got me wondering what this focus was missing. I did start as a historian of modern China, after all, so it was natural that I would start thinking about ties between Taiwan and China and between people from those two closely linked nations. I began thinking about what the history of people who moved between Taiwan and China in the 20th century would look like. Thinking about the nearly four decades between 1949 and the late 1980s, when it was nearly impossible to make this crossing in either direction, reminded me of several stories truly from another age, the 1960s-80s pilots and hijackers who escaped the PRC to “fly to freedom” in Taiwan. I was not sure what kind of history I could write of this era, but I knew I had identified my next big project in my study of modern Taiwanese history. Learning about the stories of 16 defections between 1960 and 1989 and crafting them into a single history of an era was a challenging and rewarding process.
The specific defection featured in my IJTS article made international news in 1977 and seemed to foretell momentous change. It was understood in Taiwan as a direct rebuke to world leaders like new U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who was well on his way to normalizing relations with the PRC. Fan Yuanyan, the defecting pilot, was featured in the pages of America’s People magazine, sharing the spotlight with stars like Farrah Fawcett. The scope of this case made it an easy choice for me to focus on as the topic of a journal article first. (As noted above, I eventually expanded this to a monograph covering several of these dramatic incidents: Defectors from the PRC to Taiwan, 1960-1989: The Anti-Communist Righteous Warriors, published by Routledge in 2022.) I was fascinated – as I hoped readers of this IJTS article and/or my later book would be as well – by these stories that were imagined in Taiwan to herald a new stage of an ROC anti-communist victory and return to China. The fact that these hopes were not realized does not make them historically insignificant; from the historian’s perspective, in fact, these are treasured glimpses into a long-gone yet fervent wish shared by millions of people in Taiwan. This orthodoxy from half a century ago is jarring to consider today, but the fact that it does not align with present dominant ideas about Taiwanese history is actually part of what makes it a history worth remembering.
Part of the challenge and the fun of this project was the fact that very little had been written historically about these defectors, or as they were known more specifically in Taiwan, the “anti-communist righteous warriors” (反共義士). I was encouraged every time I talked to someone and heard their memories of these exciting events. I was confident that this project would be worthwhile in putting these anti-communist dreams in a historical context. But I never knew how this historical project would be received. Since this IJTS article and my later monograph were published, recent work in this general area has given me a case of scholarly “FOMO.” A sophisticated work by Erik Scott, titled Defectors: How the Illicit Flight of Soviet Citizens Built the Borders of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2023), set out to theorize the figure of the Soviet defector and to centre it in a new organization and conception of national borders during the Cold War era (p. 3). I was gratified to learn that Scott’s study of this parallel Soviet history began after he was fascinated to find in Georgian archives materials on a KGB (the Soviet Union’s State Security Committee) investigation of Soviet hijacking (p. ix, 192-220). But I regretted that Scott’s study was not published before mine; I missed out on and would have profited from his very different approach to understanding these unique figures and their impact on Soviet history. And further work is coming soon on this topic; interested readers should look for an upcoming edited volume from a major North American university press with chapters on Cold War-era defectors around the world and their lives in their new homes. Seeing that other historians have turned their attention to this previously little-understood Cold War topic has been rewarding. I hope that my work will be seen as an important part of this minor historical genre.
Former PLA (People’s Liberation Army) Air Force Commander Fan Yuanyan, the subject of my IJTS article, died in 2017, some 40 years and five months after his shocking defection. He was a sworn enemy of the CCP and their brutal rule of China and spoke widely of his choice to fly to freedom in Taiwan. He would see Taiwan become far more free than it was when he arrived in 1977 in an evolution that he never would have imagined or supported. The claims made in Taiwan’s media on Fan’s arrival – for example, in the Young Warrior News (cited on p. 68 of my article) – were all wrong. His arrival was not “the one leaf that tells you it’s autumn,” Chinese Communist tyranny never perished. The ROC on Taiwan never would “recover the national territory of the mainland and build a rich, powerful, healthy, happy new China based on the Three People’s Principles.” Fan died in a Taiwan that had been seen as an independent nation for longer than it had been imagined as “Free China.” Indeed, as Karl Marx observed, people “make their own history, but not as they please.” Fan and his fans were all wrong in 1977, but understanding these desires and dreams from the past can help us cherish Taiwan’s real freedom and democracy even more today.
Andrew Morris is a specialist in modern Taiwanese and Chinese history. After teaching for 24 years, he is currently Executive Director of Academic Programs and Planning at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘IJTS Open Access Awards‘.
Taiwan Insight 
