Matt Bevan

Now, one of the top newspapers in Taiwan ran translated versions of Popeye cartoons.

One of the paper's journalists, Bo Yang, did the translations.

Now, Bo Yang was extremely aware that criticism of the nationalist government was forbidden, and journalists could be punished for things they wrote in the paper.

You would think, this phrase I wrote, would they approve?

But he wasn't thinking about that when he was translating this cartoon.

It was, after all, just a cartoon about a spinach-fuelled sailor man.

So it felt like pretty safe territory.

But it was when he got to the phrase, fellow popolanians, that he ran into trouble.

There could be hundreds of translations for fellows, but I chose one which was, all my fellow countrymen.

But that was a phrase that Chiang Kai-shek used in his speeches.

The Bureau of Investigation arrested me saying, why didn't you translate it into something else?

They said portraying President Chiang as Popeye was an insult.

Whilst he was under arrest, Bo Yang was tortured and had his leg broken in order to get a confession out of him.

Then he was sentenced to 18 years in Green Island prison.

And stories like this of torture and imprisonment were routine under Chiang's Nationalist Party leadership.

And because they were under martial law, there was no way for the Taiwanese people to do anything about it.

They didn't have any control over their own government.

The actual structure of that government was bizarre.

Chiang and the parliamentarians in the National Assembly had been elected in 1948 while they were still on the mainland.

The parliamentarians had fled with Chiang to Taiwan the following year, and under martial law, no elections could be held.