{"id":2070,"date":"2026-07-31T16:19:48","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T08:19:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/?p=2070"},"modified":"2026-10-18T16:01:50","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T08:01:50","slug":"red-20260731","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/red-20260731\/","title":{"rendered":"A Leader Without a Scepter"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u201cPower has its limits; only influence reaches without bound.\u201d \u2014 The Commander\u2019s Confessions, pp. 82\u201383<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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September 9, 2006, Ketagalan Boulevard. The crowd lifted a sixty-five-year-old man high into the air. Just two months after surgery for liver cancer, he stood at the center of the sea of people and raised his right fist.<\/p>

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What that moment calls us to ask is not about its force, but a more fundamental question: by what authority did he lead these people?<\/strong><\/p>

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When he launched the movement, Shih Ming Te was not a party chairman, not an elected representative, not the head of any organization. He was a private citizen. He had no party machine, no public authority, not a single dollar of mobilization budget. When he said he would gather a million people, no one in either the Blue or the Green camp thought he could, commentators were uniformly pessimistic, and the public jeers were that he \u201coverrated himself\u201d and \u201cwould be lucky to get three thousand.\u201d<\/p>

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He had done the arithmetic himself. In an army, every nine soldiers need a squad leader, every three squads a platoon leader, and so on up the chain: how many officers would a million people need? When Chiang Kai-shek came to Taiwan, his army at its height numbered only six hundred thousand \u2014 and how many generals were there to lead it? Beneath the Red Shirts, there was not even a complete mobilization organization.<\/p>

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His conclusion: he could not rely on power; he could rely only on influence.<\/p>

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And where does influence come from? He put it plainly \u2014 influence does not come from authority, position, money, or office. It rests on the reputation built up by a lifetime\u2019s deeds, and on people\u2019s belief that a man will not sell out the people for his own fame and gain. That reputation had been accumulating since 1959, the year he applied to military academy, resolved to overthrow the Chiang family dictatorship \u2014 by then, fifty years.<\/p>

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\u201cPower can be handed over; reputation cannot be inherited.\u201d These were his words in court.<\/p>

And precisely for this reason, his opponents chose the most efficient line of attack. They did not debate corruption; they attacked his character \u2014 from \u201cpolitical gigolo\u201d to \u201cselling out Taiwan\u201d to his private life, a campaign of smears on every front. To catch the bandits, first catch their king: the fastest way to destroy a civic movement is to destroy its leader.<\/p>

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Twenty years later, this remains a question every democratic society must face: when a person holds no legal authority whatsoever, why are people willing to follow him? If the answer is reputation, then how reputation is built and how it is destroyed is not merely one man\u2019s fortune, but a condition for the survival of civil society.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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September 9, 2006, Ketagalan Boulevard. The people lift the scepterless \u201ccommander-in-chief\u201d high.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Source: Shih Ming Te, The Commander\u2019s Confessions<\/em>, 2009, pp. 82\u201383, 134\u2013141. The quotation is from \u201cOn the Brink of Civil War: Final Statement at the Red Shirt Trial.\u201d A similar statement with slightly different wording appears on p. 136; this piece uses the original sentence from the defense statement.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Want to learn more about the Red Shirt Movement and the innermost confessions of its commander-in-chief, Shih Ming Te?<\/p>

Click here to read more about The Commander\u2019s Confessions<\/em> and get your copy.<\/a><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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On September 9, 2026 \u2014 twenty years to the day after the Red Shirts took Ketagalan Boulevard \u2014 the Shih Ming Te Foundation will host the International Symposium on Civil Society, Democratic Resilience, and National Security: Twenty Years After Taiwan\u2019s Anti-Corruption Red Shirt Movement, to face the most important challenge before Taiwan today: how to defend the values and way of life we hold fast to!<\/p>

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September 9, 2006, Ketagalan Boulevard. The crowd lifted a sixty-five-year-old man high into the air. Just two months after surgery for liver cancer, he stood at the center of the sea of people and raised his right fist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":2092,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"no-sidebar","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"full-width-container","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"default","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"post_folder":[19],"class_list":["post-2070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-23"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2070"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2981,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2070\/revisions\/2981"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2092"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2070"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shihmingte.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=2070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}