“This hundred dollars is a ‘pledge’ … this hundred dollars is a ‘mandate.’” — The Commander’s Confessions, pp. 62–63
August 12, 2006, 228 Peace Memorial Park. A group of people raised their fists; beside them, someone held up a placard bearing three account numbers — a postal giro account, Chang Hwa Bank, and Union Bank of Taiwan — all in the name of Shih Ming Te.
The terms he announced publicly were these: a million people were asked to go, each on their own, to a post office or bank and remit one hundred NT dollars. Only if a million people and one hundred million dollars were reached would he take his seat on Ketagalan Boulevard and demand that Chen Shui-bian step down. If not, the campaign would be called off.
Throughout history and across the world, great mass movements — including the formation of revolutionary armies — have been summoned by command and bound together by blood. Never before had one been launched on the precondition: “Please first go stand in line at the post office and send a hundred dollars.”
The design addressed the question of legitimacy. However controversial, Chen Shui-bian was a president elected by the people, vote by vote. Those demanding his resignation had to present a mandate just as real — not a single rally of tens of thousands, but a million independent decisions, each backed by one’s own money.
And the hundred dollars was not just money. The founding statement set out two points. First, the hundred dollars was a “pledge”: a commitment to take part, by every means, in the campaign against corruption and for Chen’s removal, until it succeeded. Second, the hundred dollars was a “mandate”: authorizing the movement to represent the donor. Shih Ming Te called it the world’s most demanding opinion poll: not answering a phone call and pressing a button, but leaving home on a midsummer afternoon, standing in line at the post office, filling in a form, signing it, and paying a fifteen-dollar handling fee out of one’s own pocket.
The accounts opened on August 14. In eleven days — seven banking days — more than 1.3 million remittances came in. On August 24, headquarters closed the accounts and stopped accepting funds of its own accord — not because money had stopped coming, but because no more was needed. The final total was NT$111,195,205.
Looking back twenty years later, the real significance of this design lies not in how much money it raised, but in how it changed the definition of “support.” It did not mobilize supporters; it asked supporters first to prove themselves. Whether a movement dares to set such a threshold depends on whether it believes in its own legitimacy.
August 12, 2006, 228 Peace Memorial Park. The movement’s launch press conference, where the three pledge-fund account numbers were announced.
Source: Shih Ming Te, The Commander’s Confessions, 2009, pp. 36–37, 62–63, 78–79, 348–349. The quotation is from the full text of the movement’s launch press release of August 12, 2006, included in Part One of the book.
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The pledge-fund accounts, giro receipts, CPA audit report, and records of the subsequent donations form a rare, complete set of financial records in the history of Taiwan’s mass movements, and are being preserved and catalogued by the Shih Ming Te Foundation.
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