text:
Long March

The Long March was a military retreat by the Chinese Red Army from advancing Nationalist forces during the Chinese Civil War in 1934 through to 1936.

Several Red Army forces took various routes from Chinese Communist Party (CCP) strongholds being encircled by the Kuomintang (KMT) National Revolutionary Army. Their concurrent retreats took more than a year, traversing thousands of kilometers through western and central China to convene at the new Communist base of operations in Yan'an, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi.

The most famous of these marches was undertaken by the First Red Army under the leadership of Mao Zedong. Departing from their headquarters in the southern province of Jiangxi on 16 October 1934, the 65,000-man First Army marched more than 9,000 km in a large clockwise arc through the western frontiers of the country, ultimately meeting with other Communist forces in Yan'an on 19 October 1935. The circuitous route brought the First Army through some of the most difficult terrain in the country while pursued by the Nationalists: at first the NRA under Chiang Kai-Shek, and later by local cliques of Nationalist-aligned warlords. Fewer than 8,000 men traveling with the First Red Army survived the march.

The Second and Fourth Red Armies would continue to retreat under pressure into the following year, ultimately meeting the First Army in Yan'an on 22 October 1936.

Mao's leadership during the retreat brought him immense prestige and support among many within the otherwise-shattered Communist Party. It marked the beginning of Mao's long ascent to primacy within the CCP, and would be featured heavily in his public image, through the founding of the People's Republic.

1920s–1934

 * 23 July 1921: The Chinese Communist Party is formally founded.
 * 1928: The CCP's Red Army is founded, concentrated in Jiangxi and Fujian.
 * 7 November 1931: The Jiangxi–Fujian Soviet is founded by Mao Zedong and Zhu De in the capital of Ruijin, as the first member of the Chinese Soviet Republic.
 * December 1931: Zhou Enlai arrives in Ruijin, replacing Mao as political commissar of the Red Army.
 * October 1932: At the Ningdu Conference, the majority of Red Army leaders criticize Mao's tactics. Mao is demoted to a figurehead status.
 * 1933: Bo Gu and Otto Braun arrive from the USSR, reorganize the Red Army, and take control of Party affairs. Four successive encirclement campaigns by the Nationalists are defeated.
 * 25 September 1933: The Fifth Encirclement Campaign begins, with Bo and Braun eventually defeated in October 1934.
 * 10 October 1934: The First Red Army, consisting of 130,000 soldiers and civilians led by Bo and Braun, begins the Long March, departing from Yudu in Jiangxi.
 * 25 December–3 November 1934: The First Army fights the Nationalists at the Battle of Xiang River.

1935

 * 15–17 January: The leadership of Bo and Braun is denounced at the Zunyi Conference. Zhou becomes the most powerful person in the Party, with Mao becoming Zhou's assistant.
 * March: The Fourth Red Army under Zhang Guotao departs from its base on the Sichuan–Shaanxi border.
 * 29 April–8 May: The First Army crosses the Jinsha River, the upper stetches of the Yangtze.
 * 22 May: The Red Army forms an alliance with the Yi people.
 * 29 May: The First Army captures Luding Bridge.
 * June–July: The First and Fourth Armies meet at Maogong. Mao and Zhang disagree on strategy, and the forces ultimately separate.
 * July: The First Army crosses the Jade Dragon Snow Mountains.
 * August: The First Army crosses the Zoigê Marsh.
 * 16 September: The First Army crosses the Lazikou Pass.
 * 19 October: The First Army arrives in Yan'an, ending their Long March.
 * November: Mao is named the Chairman of the Military Commission.
 * 19 November: The Second Red Army under He Long begins its retreat to Yan'an, marching west from Hubei. On the same day, the Fourth Red Army is defeated by Nationalist forces at Baizhang Pass in Sichuan.

1936

 * 9 October: The Fourth Red Army meets up with the First in Huining, Gansu.
 * 22 October: The Second Red Army meets up with elements of the First in Jiangtaibao, Gansu. This ends the Long March for all forces.

The Red Army in 1934
The divisions of the Red Army were named according to historical circumstances, not strictly according to the chronological order of their formation. Indeed, early Communist units would often form by defection from existing Kuomintang forces, and they kept their original designations. By the time of the Long March, numerous small units had been organized into three unified Armies: the First, the Second, and the Fourth. To distinguish them from earlier organizational divisions, some translations opt to refer to these same units as the "Front Red Armies", correspondingly numbered.

The First Red Army under the command of Bo Gu and Otto Braun formed from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th Army Corps in southern Jiangxi. When several units formed the Fourth Red Army under Zhang Guotao in the Sichuan–Shaanxi border area, no standard naming system yet existed, in part lending to limited central control by the CCP over separate Communist-controlled enclaves. After these first two forces were organized, the Second Red Army was formed in eastern Guizhou by unifying the 2nd Army Corps under Xiao Ke with the 6th Army Corps under He Long. A Third Red Army was briefly led by He in the area straddling the Hunan–Hubei border, but its defeat in 1932 led to its merger with the 6th Army Corps in October 1934. These three armies would maintain their historical designations until the formation of the Second United Front with the National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War, which nominally integrated the Communist forces into the NRA, forming the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army.

Civil War
The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu with Soviet support. The CCP initially collaborated with the nationalist Kuomintang, founded by the revolutionary republican Sun Yat-sen. However, after the unexpected death of Sun in March 1925, a power struggle within the KMT led to the shift in the party's authority to Chiang Kai-shek, whose Northern Expedition forces succeeded in wresting control of large areas of China from local warlords and establishing a unified government in Nanjing in April 1927. Unlike other nationalist leaders, like Wang Jingwei, Chiang was opposed to the idea of continued collaboration with the CCP. The initial period of cooperation to unify China and end the unequal treaties broke up in April 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek struck out against the Communists. Unsuccessful urban insurrections (in Nanchang, Wuhan and Guangzhou) and the suppression of the CCP in Shanghai and other cities drove many party supporters to rural strongholds such as the Jiangxi Soviet, which was organized by Mao Zedong. By 1928, deserters and defecting Kuomintang army units, supplemented by peasants from the Communist rural soviets, formed the Chinese Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. The ideological confrontation between the CCP and the KMT soon evolved into the first phase of the Chinese Civil War.

The Jiangxi Soviet
By 1930, the Red Army had established the Chinese Soviet Republic in the provinces of Jiangxi and Fujian around the city of Ruijin, including industrial facilities.

After the establishment of the Jiangxi Soviet, Mao's status within the Party declined. In 1930, Mao claimed a need to eliminate alleged KMT spies and Anti-Bolsheviks operating inside the Jiangxi Soviet and began an ideological campaign featuring torture and guilt by association, in order to eliminate his enemies. The campaign continued until the end of 1931, killing approximately 70,000 people and reducing the size of the Red Army from 40,000 to less than 10,000. The de facto leader of the party at the time, Zhou Enlai, originally supported Mao's purges as necessary to eliminate KMT spies. After Zhou arrived in Jiangxi in December 1931, he criticized Mao's campaigns for being directed more against anti-Maoists than legitimate threats to the Party, for the campaign's general senselessness, and for the widespread use of torture to extract confessions. During 1932, following Zhou's efforts to end Mao's ideological persecutions, the campaigns gradually subsided.

In December, of 1931 Zhou replaced Mao Zedong as Secretary of the First Front Army and political commissar of the Red Army. Liu Bocheng, Lin Biao and Peng Dehuai all criticized Mao's tactics at the August 1932 Ningdu Conference. The most senior leaders to support Mao in 1932 were Zhou Enlai, who had become disillusioned with the strategic leadership of other senior leaders in the Party, and Mao's old comrade, Zhu De. Zhou's support was not enough, and Mao was demoted to being a figurehead in the Soviet government, until he regained his position later, during the Long March.

Chiang's Encirclement Campaigns
In early 1933, Bo Gu arrived in Jiangxi with the German Comintern adviser Otto Braun and took control of Party affairs. Zhou at this time, apparently with strong support from Party and military colleagues, reorganized and standardized the Red Army. Under Zhou, Bo, and Braun, the Red Army defeated four attacks by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops.

Chiang's fifth campaign was much more difficult to contain. In September 1933, the National Revolutionary Army under Chiang Kai-shek eventually completely encircled Jiangxi, with the advice and tactical assistance of his German adviser, Hans von Seeckt. A fortified perimeter was established by Chiang's forces, and Jiangxi was besieged in an attempt to destroy the Communist forces trapped within. In July 1934, the leaders of the Party, dominated by the "Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks", a militant group formed in Moscow by Wang Ming and Bo Gu, forced Mao from the Politburo of the CCP in Ruijin and placed him briefly under house arrest. Mao was replaced by Zhou Enlai as leader of the military commission.

Chiang's strategy of slowly constructing a series of interlinking blockhouses (resembling medieval castles) was successful, and Chiang's army was able to capture several major Communist strongholds within months. Between January and March 1934, the Nationalists advanced slowly. Bo and Braun continued to employ orthodox military tactics, resulting in a series of Kuomintang advances and heavy Communist casualties. In October 1934 KMT troops won a decisive battle and drove deep into the heart of the Central Soviet Area. When Ruijin became exposed to KMT attack, Party leaders faced the choice of either remaining and perishing or of abandoning the base area and attempting to break through the enemy encirclement.

In August 1934, with the Red Army depleted by the prolonged conflict, a spy, Mo Xiong, who had been placed by Zhou Enlai in the KMT army headquarters in Nanchang, brought news that Chiang Kai-shek was preparing a major offensive against the Communist capital, Ruijin. The Communist leadership decided on a strategic retreat to regroup with other Communist units, and to avoid annihilation. The original plan was to link up with the Second Red Army commanded by He Long, thought to be in Hubei to the west and north. Communications between divided groups of the Red Army had been disrupted by the Kuomintang campaign. During the planning to evacuate Jiangxi, the First Red Army was unaware that these other Communist forces were also retreating westward.

Escape from Jiangxi
Since the Central Base Area could not be held, the Standing Committee appointed Bo (responsible for politics), Braun (responsible for military strategy), and Zhou (responsible for the implementation of military planning) to organize the evacuation. Since the enemy was close, Zhou, in charge of logistics, made his plans in complete secrecy. It was not disclosed who was to leave or when: even senior leaders were only at the last moments told of the Army's movements. It is not known what criteria were used to determine who would stay and who would go, but 16,000 troops and some of the Communists' most notable commanders at the time (including Xiang Ying, Chen Yi, Tan Zhenlin, and Qu Qiubai) were left to form a rear guard, to divert the main force of Nationalist troops from noticing, and preventing, the general withdrawal.

The first movements to screen the retreat were undertaken by forces led by Fang Zhimin, breaking through Kuomintang lines in June 1934. Although Fang Zhimin's troops were soon destroyed, these movements surprised the Kuomintang, who were numerically superior to the Communists at the time and did not expect an attack on their fortified perimeter.

The early troop movements were actually a diversion to allow the retreat of more important leaders from Jiangxi. On October 16, 1934, a force of about 130,000 soldiers and civilians under Bo Gu and Otto Braun attacked the line of Kuomintang positions near Yudu. More than 86,000 troops, 11,000 administrative personnel and thousands of civilian porters actually completed the breakout; the remainder, largely wounded or ill soldiers, continued to fight a delaying action after the main force had left, and then dispersed into the countryside. Several prominent members of the Chinese Soviet who remained behind were captured and executed by the Kuomintang after the fall of Ruijin in November 1934, including Qu Qiubai and the youngest brother of Mao Zedong, Mao Zetan. The withdrawal began in early October 1934. Zhou's intelligence agents were successful in identifying a large section of Chiang's blockhouse lines that were manned by troops under General Chen Jitang, a Guangdong warlord who Zhou identified as being likely to prefer preserving the strength of his troops over fighting. Zhou sent Pan Hannian to negotiate for safe passage with General Chen, who subsequently allowed the Red Army to pass through the territory that he controlled without fighting. The Red army successfully crossed the Xinfeng River and marched through the province of Guangdong and into Hunan before encountering the last of Chiang's fortifications at the Xiang River.

After passing through three of the four blockhouse fortifications needed to escape Chiang's encirclement, the Red Army was finally intercepted by regular Nationalist troops, and suffered heavy casualties. Of the 86,000 Communists who attempted to break out of Jiangxi with the First Red Army, only 36,000 successfully escaped. Due to the low morale within the Red Army at the time, it is not possible to know what proportion of these losses were due to military casualties, and which proportion were due to desertion. The conditions of the Red Army's forced withdrawal demoralized some Communist leaders (particularly Bo Gu and Otto Braun), but Zhou remained calm and retained his command. Most Communist losses occurred over only two days of heavy fighting, from November 30 to December 1, 1934.

Determining the direction of the Red Army
After escaping Chiang's encirclement, it was obvious to Party leaders that Chiang was intent on intercepting what remained of the Red Army in Hunan, and the direction of the Red Army's movements had to be reconsidered. The plan to rendezvous and join He Long's army in Hunan had become too risky. Mao suggested to Zhou that the Red Army change direction, towards Guizhou, where Mao expected enemy defenses to be weak.

A meeting at Tongdao, close to the border of Hunan and Guizhou, was convened to discuss the direction of the Red Army on December 12, 1934. Zhou endorsed Mao's proposal, encouraging other leaders to overrule the objections of Bo and Braun. Another dispute of the direction of the Red Army occurred soon after, once the Red Army reached Liping, in the mountains of southeast Guizhou. Braun believed that they should travel to eastern Guizhou, but Mao wanted to go to western Guizhou, where he expected KMT forces to be lighter and which borders Sichuan, and to establish a base area there. In a meeting to decide the army's direction, Zhou sided with Mao, making Braun "fly into a rage because he was overruled in the debate." At the meeting it was decided that the Red Army would travel towards Zunyi, in western Guizhou.

On January 1, 1935, the Red Army reached the Wu River. Bo and Braun again insisted the Red Army move back to western Hunan to join other Communist troops in the area, but their prestige had considerably declined by that point, and their suggestion was rejected. Even Zhou had become impatient, and proposed a new rule which was put into effect immediately: that all military plans had to be submitted to the Politburo for approval. The movement passed, clearly depriving Braun of the right to direct military affairs. On January 15 the Red Army captured Zunyi, the second largest city in Guizhou. As Mao had predicted, the city was weakly defended, and was too far from Nationalist forces to be under immediate threat of attack. By the time the Red Army occupied Zunyi, it was highly depleted, and counted little more than 10,000 men. Zhou used the peace afforded in Zunyi to call an enlarged Politburo meeting, in order to examine the causes of the Communists' repeated defeats.

The Zunyi Conference
The Communists' Zunyi Conference lasted from January 15–17, 1935, and resulted in a reshuffling of the Party politburo. Zhou intended the conference to draw lessons from the Red Army's past failures, and to develop strategies for the future. Much of the discussion revolved around whether the defeats of the Red Army were due to unavoidable circumstances, or inadequacies of leadership. Bo Gu, the first speaker, attributed the Red Army's losses to "objective" causes, particularly the enemy's overwhelming numerical superiority, and poor coordination of Communist forces. Braun's interpreter, Wu Xiuquan, later recalled that Bo's arguments did not impress his audience, and that Bo came across as someone attempting to avoid responsibility.

Zhou Enlai was the next to speak. Zhou blamed the Red Army's failures on poor decisions at the leadership level, and blamed himself as one of the three people most responsible. Zhou's willingness to accept responsibility was well received. Zhang Wentian, basing many of his conclusions on recent discussions with Mao, attacked Bo and Braun directly, criticizing them for numerous strategic and tactical errors.

After Zhang, Mao gave a speech in which he analyzed the poor tactics and strategies of the two leaders. With Zhou's explicit backing, Mao won over the meeting. Seventeen of the meeting's twenty participants (the exceptions being Bo, Braun, and He Kequan) argued in his favor.

Of the three leaders who had controlled the Party before the Zunyi Conference, only Zhou Enlai's political career survived. Zhou was held partially responsible for the Red Army's defeat, but was retained at the top level of Party leadership because of his differences with Bo and Braun at Ningdu, his successful tactics in defeating Chiang's fourth Encirclement Campaign, and his resolute support of Mao. Although the failed leadership of Bo Gu and Otto Braun was denounced, Mao was not able to win the support of a sufficient number of Party leaders to gain outright power at the conference.

A major shift in the Party's leadership occurred two months later, in March 1935. Mao was passed over for the position of General Secretary by Zhang Wentian, but gained enough influence to be elected one of three members of Military Affairs Commission. The other two members were Zhou Enlai, who retained his position as Director of the commission, and Wang Jiaxiang, whose support Mao had enlisted earlier. Within this group, Zhou was empowered to make the final decisions on military matters, while Mao was Zhou's assistant. Wang was in charge of Party affairs.

Escaping Chiang's pursuit
When the army resumed its march northward, the direct route to Sichuan was blocked by Chiang's forces. Mao's forces spent the next several months maneuvering to avoid direct confrontation with hostile forces, but still attempting to move north to join Zhang Guotao's Fourth Red Army. While Chiang's armies approached Mao in northern Guizhou from three directions, Mao maneuvered out of the encirclement by crossing the Chishui River four times. Then, Mao led the Red Army, crossing the Wu River and marching towards Guiyang. He feigned an attack to this city when Chiang was visiting. Chiang ordered his army in Kunming to move eastward to save Guiyang, but the Red Army turned towards Kunming immediately and entered Yunnan, where the Yangtze River was lightly guarded.

In February 1935, Mao's wife, He Zizhen, gave birth to a daughter. Because of the harsh conditions, the infant was left with a local family.

The Communist forces were harassed by both the Kuomintang and local warlords. To avoid a fatal confrontation, Zhou and Mao maneuvered the Red army south and west, through Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, feigning attacks on Guiyang and Kunming to disguise their movements. The First Red Army crossed the Yangtze (the section of Jinsha River) on May 9, 1935, finally escaping determined pursuit, but still had to deal with dangerous mountain passes at heights of up to 4,000 meters, rough climatic conditions, shortages of food, clothing, and equipment, and tribes of local ethnic groups hostile to Chinese encroachment. The Red Army had to capture river crossings defended by warlords and Nationalist troops. The most famous was Luding Bridge, extolled in official history as an heroic triumph, although many historians now believe that the difficulty of the battle was exaggerated or that the incident was fabricated for propaganda purposes.

Conflict with ethnic warlords
Warlords often refused to help out the Kuomintang against the Communist Red Army, preferring to save their own forces.

300 "Khampa bandits" were enlisted into the Kuomintang's Consolatory Commission military in Sichuan, where they were part of the effort of the central government of China to penetrate and destabilize the local Han warlords such as Liu Wenhui. The Chinese government sought to exercise full control over frontier areas against the warlords. Liu had refused to do battle with the Red Army, to save his own military from destruction. The Consolatory Commission forces were used to battle the Communist Red Army, but were defeated when their religious leader was captured by Communist forces.

Communist forces on the Long March clashed against Kham rebels in the 1934 Khamba Rebellion, who were fleeing from Tibetan government forces.

The Fourth Red Army
In June–July 1935, the troops under Mao united with the Fourth Red Army, led by Zhang Guotao, which had retreated west from Henan. Zhang had taken a different route of evacuation, and arrived at Lianghekou with 84,000 troops in relatively good condition. The fact that he had control of superior forces gave him the power to challenge the authority of Zhou and Mao, whose power was based largely on the Party's support. Zhang demanded that one of his own generals, Chen Changhao, take over Zhou's position as political commissar of the entire Red Army, and suggested that Zhang himself replace Zhu De on the Military Commission. Zhang argued that such a reorganization would create a more "equal" army organization. On July 18, Zhou relinquished his position as political commissar, and several leading positions were taken over by generals of the Fourth Red Army.

These changes had no long-term significance because Zhang and Mao disagreed with the direction of the army. Zhang insisted on going southwest, while Mao insisted on going northwards, towards Shaanxi. No agreement was reached, and the two armies eventually split, each going their separate ways.

Zhang Guotao's Fourth Red Army took a different route than Mao, travelling south, then west, and finally north through China. On the way Zhang's forces were largely destroyed by the forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his Chinese Muslim allies, the Ma clique. The remnants of Zhang's forces later rejoined elements of the Second Red Army before eventually linking up with Mao's forces in Shaanxi.

The Second Red Army
The Second Red Army began its own withdrawal west from Hubei in November 1935, led by He Long, who commanded the KMT Twentieth Army in 1923 before joining the CCP. In 1932 he established a soviet in the Hunan-Jiangxi border area, and in August 1934 received command of the Second Red Army, establishing a base in Hubei. An advance party of the First Red Army, called the Sixth Corps, commanded by Xiao Ke, was sent towards the Second Red Army two months before the beginning of the Long March. Xiao Ke's force would link up with He Long and his army, but lost communication with the First Army that came behind. It was at this point that Li Zhen's unit was assigned to He Long's command, having already served in the Sixth Corps.

On November 19, 1935, the Second Red Army set out on its own Long March. He Long's force was driven further west than the First Red Army, all the way to Lijiang in Yunnan province, then across the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain massif and through the Tibetan highlands of western Sichuan. He Long and Xiao Ke were married to sisters who also accompanied the army. He Long's wife, Jian Xianren, carried the baby daughter she had given birth to three weeks before the retreat began. Jian Xianfo gave birth to a son in the desolate swamps of northern Sichuan. Forces of the Second Army detained two European missionaries, Rudolf Bosshardt and Arnolis Hayman, for 16 months. Bosshardt later related his account of the details of daily life on the Long March in a book.

Union of the three armies
Mao's First Red Army traversed several swamps and was attacked by Muslim Hui Ma clique forces under Generals Ma Bufang and Ma Buqing. Finally, in October 1935, Mao's army reached Shaanxi province and joined with local Communist forces there, led by Liu Zhidan, Gao Gang, and Xu Haidong, who had already established a Soviet base in northern Shaanxi. The remnants of Zhang's Fourth Red Army eventually rejoined Mao in Shaanxi, but with his army destroyed, Zhang, even as a founding member of the CCP, was never able to challenge Mao's authority. After an expedition of almost a year, the Second Red Army reached Bao'an (Shaanxi) on October 22, 1936, known in China as the "union of the three armies", and the end of the Long March.

All along the way, the Communist Army confiscated property and weapons from local warlords and landlords, while recruiting peasants and the poor. Nevertheless, only some 8,000 troops under Mao's command, the First Front Army, ultimately made it to the final destination of Yan'an in 1935. Of these, less than 7,000 were among the original 100,000 soldiers who had started the march. A variety of factors contributed to the losses including fatigue, hunger and cold, sickness, desertion, and military casualties. During the retreat, membership in the party fell from 300,000 to around 40,000.

In November 1935, shortly after settling in northern Shaanxi, Mao officially took over Zhou Enlai's leading position in the Red Army. Following a major reshuffling of official roles, Mao became the chairman of the Military Commission, with Zhou and Deng Xiaoping as vice-chairmen. (After Zhang Gutao reached Shaanxi, Deng was replaced by Zhang). This marked Mao's position as the pre-eminent leader of the Party, with Zhou in a position second to Mao. Both Mao and Zhou would retain their positions until their deaths, in 1976.

Aftermath

While costly, the Long March gave the CCP the isolation it needed, allowing its army to recuperate and rebuild in the north. It also was vital in helping the CCP to gain a positive reputation among the peasants due to the determination and dedication of the surviving participants of the Long March. Mao wrote in 1935: "The Long March is a manifesto. It has proclaimed to the world that the Red Army is an army of heroes, while the imperialists and their running dogs, Chiang Kai-shek and his like, are impotent. It has proclaimed their utter failure to encircle, pursue, obstruct and intercept us. The Long March is also a propaganda force. It has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation."

In addition, policies ordered by Mao for all soldiers to follow, the Eight Points of Attention, instructed the army to treat peasants respectfully and pay fairly for, rather than confiscate, any goods, in spite of the desperate need for food and supplies. This policy won support for the Communists among the rural peasants.

Hostilities ceased while the Nationalists and Chinese Communists formed a nominal alliance during the Second Sino-Japanese War from 1937 until 1945. During these years, the CCP persevered and strengthened its influence. The Red Army fought a disciplined and organized guerilla campaign against superior Japanese forces, allowing it to gain experience. Following the end of World War II, the resurgent Communist Eighth Route Army, later called the People's Liberation Army, returned to drive the Kuomintang out of Mainland China to the island of Taiwan. Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Long March has been glorified as an example of the CCP's strength and resilience.

The Long March solidified Mao's status as the undisputed leader of the CCP, though he did not officially become party chairman until 1943. Other survivors of the March also went on to become prominent party leaders well into the 1990s, including Zhu De, Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, Dong Biwu, Ye Jianying, Li Xiannian, Yang Shangkun, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping.

At the age of 9, Xiang Xuan, the nephew of He Long, was the youngest participant of the Long March.

The last known survivor of the Long March, Tu Tongjin, a native of Changting, Fujian, died at the age of 108 on April 3rd, 2023.

The March in popular culture
The Chinese government produced a movie in 2006, My Long March, relating personal experiences of a fictional participant in the Long March. The movie, released in celebration of the 71st year since the end of the March, was the second of three movies in the Axis of War movie series, retelling the events stretching from the Battle of the Xiang River up to the Battle of Luding Bridge.

Historical controversies
The Long March is surrounded by conflicting accounts of what occurred. Some critics and researchers call the earlier accounts myths, but find that they are difficult to prove or disprove because the Chinese government prevents independent historians from exploring the topic. The few who were able to perform research recently struggle with the fact that many years have gone by since the march took place. Many of the survivors are no longer alive or able to accurately recall events.

Length
In 2003, controversy arose about the distance covered by Mao's First Front Army in the Long March. The figure of 25,000 li (12,500 kilometres or about 8,000 miles ) was Mao's estimate, quoted by his biographer Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China, published not long after the end of the Long March in 1938. But in an poem written by Mao in October 1935 at the end of the Long March, Mount Liupan, Mao states their distance as 20,000 li (10,000 kilometres or about 6,200 miles). In 2003, two British researchers, Ed Jocelyn and Andrew McEwen, retraced the route in 384 days, and in their 2006 book "The Long March" estimated the March actually covered about 6,000 km (3,700 miles or 11,154 li). Chinese media, Beijing Daily disputed their report: "The 25,000 li of the Red Army's Long March are a historic fact." Beijing Daily proved that even the First Red Army, which had the least walking distance, travelled closer to 18,088 li (9,375 km or 6,000 miles), and the two British young men did not follow the route in those years. In 2005, Xiaoai Zhang, the daughter of Aiping Zhang and David Ben Uziel, Israeli soldier and photographer, retraced the route again and recorded around 24,000 km.

Luding Bridge
The Battle of Luding Bridge has been portrayed as a glorious and heroic moment in Chinese Communist history, analogous to the Texan Battle of the Alamo. The official account of the battle depicts exhausted and depleted Communist forces in a desperate situation, where they must fight across a bridge that is guarded by the numerically superior forces of Chiang Kai-shek and his warlord allies. The Communists send a small volunteer force that braves a hail of gunfire to climb across the bridge on underlying chains and assault the enemy positions on the other side, hence securing the bridgehead for the rest of the army to cross.

However, there is evidence that differs from the official account of the battle. This suggests that much of the fighting was dramatized by Communist leaders for propaganda purposes. Authors Andrew McEwen and Ed Jocelyn who retraced the route of the Long March, interviewing survivors along the way, said that a woman in her early 80s recalled that local people led the way across the bridge and were all shot and killed. Author Sun Shuyun quotes a witness who said that there was a small enemy force on the other side armed with guns that could "only fire a few metres". They panicked and fled.

Use as propaganda
The writer Sun Shuyun writes that generations of Chinese have been taught a glorious account of the Long March in order to justify Mao's Revolution: "If you find it hard," they were told:

"think of the Long March; if you feel tired, think of our revolutionary forebears. The message has been drilled into us so that we can accomplish any goal set before us by the party because nothing compares in difficulty with what they did. Decades after the historical one, we have been spurred on to ever more Long Marches – to industrialize China, to feed the largest population in the world, to catch up with the West, to reform the socialist economy, to send men into space, to engage with the 21st century."

October 2006 marked the 70th anniversary of the end of the Long March. Dozens of newly released, government approved books were displayed in bookstores, with the intention of showing the heroic actions and drama of the Long March. Chinese television presented "a feast of Long March-themed entertainment, including a 20-part drama series, documentaries, and even a song-and-dance extravaganza".

Western scholars, when examining the Long March, sometimes choose to focus on aspects of the Long March rarely portrayed by Chinese propaganda. Negative aspects of the Long March include instances of the Red Army desperately recruiting local people through kidnapping, blackmail, and sex. Sun Shuyun interviewed a man who said he was barely into his teens when he was forced to join the Red Army. This veteran only joined the Red Army because his father was arrested by the Communists and would not be released until the man agreed to join the army. The man later thought of deserting, but stayed on because he feared being caught and executed. In order to escape starvation, the Red Army often stole food from villagers in the remote locations it traveled through. Driven by desperation and hunger, communist armies during the Long March sometimes took hostages for ransom.

Use as namesake

 * Vietnamese communist political leader and revolutionary Trường Chinh (1907 – 1988). Trường Chinh was born as Đặng Xuân Khu, but changed his name to Trường Chinh (meaning Long March) in honor of the Long March.
 * Chinese Long March rocket family, a series of expendable launch system operated by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), are named after the Long March.
 * Chinese Nuclear submarines, starting from Type 091 class, are named after the Long March.
 * Farakka Long March, an Anti-Indian demonstration occurred in May 1976 in Rajshahi, Bangladesh lead by the Maoist politician Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhashani in protest of the construction of Farakka Dam by India, which's name was inspired from Long March.

title: Long March


text:
Slaughterhouse

In livestock agriculture and the meat industry, a slaughterhouse, also called an abattoir, is a facility where livestock animals are slaughtered to provide food. Slaughterhouses supply meat, which then becomes the responsibility of a meat-packing facility.

Slaughterhouses that produce meat that is not intended for human consumption are sometimes referred to as knacker's yards or knackeries. This is where animals are slaughtered that are not fit for human consumption or that can no longer work on a farm, such as retired work horses.

Slaughtering animals on a large scale poses significant issues in terms of logistics, animal welfare, and the environment, and the process must meet public health requirements. Due to public aversion in different cultures, determining where to build slaughterhouses is also a matter of some consideration.

Frequently, animal rights groups raise concerns about the methods of transport to and from slaughterhouses, preparation prior to slaughter, animal herding, stunning methods, and the killing itself.

History
Until modern times, the slaughter of animals generally took place in a haphazard and unregulated manner in diverse places. Early maps of London show numerous stockyards in the periphery of the city, where slaughter occurred in the open air or under cover such as wet markets. A term for such open-air slaughterhouses was shambles, and there are streets named "The Shambles" in some English and Irish towns (e.g., Worcester, York, Bandon) which got their name from having been the site on which butchers killed and prepared animals for consumption. Fishamble Street, Dublin was formerly a fish-shambles. Sheffield had 183 slaughterhouses in 1910, and it was estimated that there were 20,000 in England and Wales.

Reform movement
The slaughterhouse emerged as a coherent institution in the 19th century. A combination of health and social concerns, exacerbated by the rapid urbanisation experienced during the Industrial Revolution, led social reformers to call for the isolation, sequester and regulation of animal slaughter. As well as the concerns raised regarding hygiene and disease, there were also criticisms of the practice on the grounds that the effect that killing had, both on the butchers and the observers, "educate[d] the men in the practice of violence and cruelty, so that they seem to have no restraint on the use of it." An additional motivation for eliminating private slaughter was to impose a careful system of regulation for the "morally dangerous" task of putting animals to death.

As a result of this tension, meat markets within the city were closed and abattoirs built outside city limits. An early framework for the establishment of public slaughterhouses was put in place in Paris in 1810, under the reign of the Emperor Napoleon. Five areas were set aside on the outskirts of the city and the feudal privileges of the guilds were curtailed.

As the meat requirements of the growing number of residents in London steadily expanded, the meat markets both within the city and beyond attracted increasing levels of public disapproval. Meat had been traded at Smithfield Market as early as the 10th century. By 1726, it was regarded as "without question, the greatest in the world", by Daniel Defoe. By the middle of the 19th century, in the course of a single year 220,000 head of cattle and 1,500,000 sheep would be "violently forced into an area of five acres, in the very heart of London, through its narrowest and most crowded thoroughfares".

By the early 19th century, pamphlets were being circulated arguing in favor of the removal of the livestock market and its relocation outside of the city due to the extremely low hygienic conditions as well as the brutal treatment of the cattle. In 1843, the Farmer's Magazine published a petition signed by bankers, salesmen, aldermen, butchers and local residents against the expansion of the livestock market. The Town Police Clauses Act 1847 created a licensing and registration system, though few slaughter houses were closed.

An Act of Parliament was eventually passed in 1852. Under its provisions, a new cattle-market was constructed in Copenhagen Fields, Islington. The new Metropolitan Cattle Market was also opened in 1855, and West Smithfield was left as waste ground for about a decade, until the construction of the new market began in the 1860s under the authority of the 1860 Metropolitan Meat and Poultry Market Act. The market was designed by architect Sir Horace Jones and was completed in 1868.

A cut and cover railway tunnel was constructed beneath the market to create a triangular junction with the railway between Blackfriars and King's Cross. This allowed animals to be transported into the slaughterhouse by train and the subsequent transfer of animal carcasses to the Cold Store building, or direct to the meat market via lifts.

At the same time, the first large and centralized slaughterhouse in Paris was constructed in 1867 under the orders of Napoleon III at the Parc de la Villette and heavily influenced the subsequent development of the institution throughout Europe.

Regulation and expansion
These slaughterhouses were regulated by law to ensure good standards of hygiene, the prevention of the spread of disease and the minimization of needless animal cruelty. The slaughterhouse had to be equipped with a specialized water supply system to effectively clean the operating area of blood and offal. Veterinary scientists, notably George Fleming and John Gamgee, campaigned for stringent levels of inspection to ensure that epizootics such as rinderpest (a devastating outbreak of the disease covered all of Britain in 1865) would not be able to spread. By 1874, three meat inspectors were appointed for the London area, and the Public Health Act 1875 required local authorities to provide central slaughterhouses (they were only given powers to close unsanitary slaughterhouses in 1890). Yet the appointment of slaughterhouse inspectors and the establishment of centralised abattoirs took place much earlier in the British colonies, such as the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria, and in Scotland where 80% of cattle were slaughtered in public abattoirs by 1930. In Victoria the Melbourne Abattoirs Act 1850 (NSW) "confined the slaughtering of animals to prescribed public abattoirs, while at the same time prohibiting the killing of sheep, lamb, pigs or goats at any other place within the city limits". Animals were shipped alive to British ports from Ireland, from Europe and from the colonies and slaughtered in large abattoirs at the ports. Conditions were often very poor.

Attempts were also made throughout the British Empire to reform the practice of slaughter itself, as the methods used came under increasing criticism for causing undue pain to the animals. The eminent physician, Benjamin Ward Richardson, spent many years in developing more humane methods of slaughter. He brought into use no fewer than fourteen possible anesthetics for use in the slaughterhouse and even experimented with the use of electric current at the Royal Polytechnic Institution. As early as 1853, he designed a lethal chamber that would gas animals to death relatively painlessly, and he founded the Model Abattoir Society in 1882 to investigate and campaign for humane methods of slaughter.

The invention of refrigeration and the expansion of transportation networks by sea and rail allowed for the safe exportation of meat around the world. Additionally, meat-packing millionaire Philip Danforth Armour's invention of the "disassembly line" greatly increased the productivity and profit margin of the meat packing industry: "according to some, animal slaughtering became the first mass-production industry in the United States." This expansion has been accompanied by increased concern about the physical and mental conditions of the workers along with controversy over the ethical and environmental implications of slaughtering animals for meat.

The Edinburgh abattoir, which was built in 1910, had well lit laboratories, hot and cold water, gas, microscopes and equipment for cultivating organisms. The English 1924 Public Health (Meat) Regulations required notification of slaughter to enable inspection of carcasses and enabled inspected carcasses to be marked.

The development of slaughterhouses was linked with industrial expansion of by-products. By 1932 the British by-product industry was worth about £97 million a year, employing 310,000 people. The Aberdeen slaughterhouse sent hooves to Lancashire to make glue, intestines to Glasgow for sausages and hides to the Midland tanneries. In January 1940 the British government took over the 16,000 slaughterhouses and by 1942 there were only 779.

Design
In the latter part of the 20th century, the layout and design of most U.S. slaughterhouses was influenced by the work of Temple Grandin. She suggested that reducing the stress of animals being led to slaughter may help slaughterhouse operators improve efficiency and profit. In particular she applied an understanding of animal psychology to design pens and corrals which funnel a herd of animals arriving at a slaughterhouse into a single file ready for slaughter. Her corrals employ long sweeping curves  so that each animal is prevented from seeing what lies ahead and just concentrates on the hind quarters of the animal in front of it. This design – along with the design elements of solid sides, solid crowd gate, and reduced noise at the end point – work together to encourage animals forward in the chute and to not reverse direction.

Mobile design
Beginning in 2008 the Local Infrastructure for Local Agriculture, a non-profit committed to revitalizing opportunities for "small farmers and strengthening the connection between local supply and demand", constructed a mobile slaughterhouse facility in efforts for small farmers to process meat quickly and cost effectively. Named the Modular Harvest System, or M.H.S., it received USDA approval in 2010. The M.H.S. consists of three separate trailers: One for slaughtering, one for consumable body parts, and one for other body parts. Preparation of individual cuts is done at a butchery or other meat preparation facility.

International variations
The standards and regulations governing slaughterhouses vary considerably around the world. In many countries the slaughter of animals is regulated by custom and tradition rather than by law. In the non-Western world, including the Arab world, the Indian sub-continent, etc., both forms of meat are available: one which is produced in modern mechanized slaughterhouses, and the other from local butcher shops.

In some communities animal slaughter and permitted species may be controlled by religious laws, most notably halal for Muslims and kashrut for Jewish communities. This can cause conflicts with national regulations when a slaughterhouse adhering to the rules of religious preparation is located in some Western countries. In Jewish law, captive bolts and other methods of pre-slaughter paralysis are generally not permissible, due to it being forbidden for an animal to be stunned prior to slaughter. Various halal food authorities have more recently permitted the use of a recently developed fail-safe system of head-only stunning where the shock is non-fatal, and where it is possible to reverse the procedure and revive the animal after the shock. The use of electronarcosis and other methods of dulling the sensing has been approved by the Egyptian Fatwa Committee. This allows these entities to continue their religious techniques while keeping accordance to the national regulations.

In some societies, traditional cultural and religious aversion to slaughter led to prejudice against the people involved. In Japan, where the ban on slaughter of livestock for food was lifted in the late 19th century, the newly found slaughter industry drew workers primarily from villages of burakumin, who traditionally worked in occupations relating to death (such as executioners and undertakers). In some parts of western Japan, prejudice faced by current and former residents of such areas (burakumin "hamlet people") is still a sensitive issue. Because of this, even the Japanese word for "slaughter" (屠殺 tosatsu) is deemed politically incorrect by some pressure groups as its inclusion of the kanji for "kill" (殺) supposedly portrays those who practise it in a negative manner.

Some countries have laws that exclude specific animal species or grades of animal from being slaughtered for human consumption, especially those that are taboo food. The former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee suggested in 2004 introducing legislation banning the slaughter of cows throughout India, as Hinduism holds cows as sacred and considers their slaughter unthinkable and offensive. This was often opposed on grounds of religious freedom. The slaughter of cows and the importation of beef into the nation of Nepal are strictly forbidden.

Freezing works
Refrigeration technology allowed meat from the slaughterhouse to be preserved for longer periods. This led to the concept as the slaughterhouse as a freezing works. Prior to this, canning was an option. Freezing works are common in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. In countries where meat is exported for a substantial profit the freezing works were built near docks, or near transport infrastructure.

Mobile poultry processing units (MPPUs) follow the same principles, but typically require only one trailer and, in much of the United States, may legally operate under USDA exemptions not available to red meat processors. Several MPPUs have been in operation since before 2010, under various models of operation and ownership.

Law
Most countries have laws in regard to the treatment of animals in slaughterhouses. In the United States, there is the Humane Slaughter Act of 1958, a law requiring that all swine, sheep, cattle, and horses be stunned unconscious with application of a stunning device by a trained person before being hoisted up on the line. There is some debate over the enforcement of this act. This act, like those in many countries, exempts slaughter in accordance to religious law, such as kosher shechita and dhabiha halal. Most strict interpretations of kashrut require that the animal be fully sensible when its carotid artery is cut.

The novel The Jungle presented a fictionalized account of unsanitary conditions in slaughterhouses and the meatpacking industry during the 1800s. This led directly to an investigation commissioned directly by President Theodore Roosevelt, and to the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which established the Food and Drug Administration. A much larger body of regulation deals with the public health and worker safety regulation and inspection.

Animal welfare concerns
In 1997, Gail Eisnitz, chief investigator for the Humane Farming Association (HFA), released the book Slaughterhouse. Within, she unveils the interviews of slaughterhouse workers in the U.S. who say that, because of the speed with which they are required to work, animals are routinely skinned while apparently alive and still blinking, kicking and shrieking. Eisnitz argues that this is not only cruel to the animals but also dangerous for the human workers, as cows weighing several thousands of pounds thrashing around in pain are likely to kick out and debilitate anyone working near them.

This would imply that certain slaughterhouses throughout the country are not following the guidelines and regulations spelled out by the Humane Slaughter Act, requiring all animals to be put down and thus insusceptible to pain by some form, typically electronarcosis, before undergoing any form of violent action.

According to the HFA, Eiznitz interviewed slaughterhouse workers representing over two million hours of experience, who, without exception, told her that they have beaten, strangled, boiled and dismembered animals alive or have failed to report those who do. The workers described the effects the violence has had on their personal lives, with several admitting to being physically abusive or taking to alcohol and other drugs.

The HFA alleges that workers are required to kill up to 1,100 hogs an hour and end up taking their frustration out on the animals. Eisnitz interviewed one worker, who had worked in ten slaughterhouses, about pig production. He told her:

"Hogs get stressed out pretty easy. If you prod them too much, they have heart attacks. If you get a hog in the chute that's had the shit prodded out of him and has a heart attack or refuses to move, you take a meat hook and hook it into his bunghole. You try to do this by clipping the hipbone. Then you drag him backwards. You're dragging these hogs alive, and a lot of times the meat hook rips out of the bunghole. I've seen hams – thighs – completely ripped open. I've also seen intestines come out. If the hog collapses near the front of the chute, you shove the meat hook into his cheek and drag him forward."

Animal rights activists, anti-speciesists, vegetarians and vegans are prominent critics of slaughterhouses and have created events such as the march to close all slaughterhouses to voice concerns about the conditions in slaughterhouses and ask for their abolition. Some have argued that humane animal slaughter is impossible.

Slaughterhouse mortality impact
American slaughterhouse workers are three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker. NPR reports that pig and cattle slaughterhouse workers are nearly seven times more likely to suffer repetitive strain injuries than average. The Guardian reports that on average there are two amputations a week involving slaughterhouse workers in the United States. On average, one employee of Tyson Foods, the largest meat producer in America, is injured and amputates a finger or limb per month. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that over a period of six years, in the UK 78 slaughter workers lost fingers, parts of fingers or limbs, more than 800 workers had serious injuries, and at least 4,500 had to take more than three days off after accidents. In a 2018 study in the Italian Journal of Food Safety, slaughterhouse workers are instructed to wear ear protectors to protect their hearing from the loud noises in the facility. A 2004 study in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine found that "excess risks were observed for mortality from all causes, all cancers, and lung cancer" in workers employed in the New Zealand meat processing industry.

The worst thing, worse than the physical danger, is the emotional toll. If you work in the stick pit [where hogs are killed] for any period of time – that lets you kill things but doesn't let you care. You may look a hog in the eye that's walking around in the blood pit with you and think, "God, that really isn't a bad looking animal." You may want to pet it. Pigs down on the kill floor have come up to nuzzle me like a puppy. Two minutes later I had to kill them – beat them to death with a pipe. I can't care.

Psychological impact
Slaughterhouse workers have a higher prevalence rate of mental health distress, including anxiety, detachment, depression, emotional numbing, perpetrator trauma, psychosocial distress, and PTSD, violence-supportive attitudes, and an increased crime levels. Slaughterhouse workers have adaptive and maladaptive strategies to cope with the workplace environment and associated stressors.

Working at slaughterhouses often leads to a high amount of psychological trauma. A 2016 study in Organization indicates, "Regression analyses of data from 10,605 Danish workers across 44 occupations suggest that slaughterhouse workers consistently experience lower physical and psychological well-being along with increased incidences of negative coping behavior." A 2009 study by criminologist Amy Fitzgerald indicates, "slaughterhouse employment increases total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, arrests for rape, and arrests for other sex offenses in comparison with other industries." As authors from the PTSD Journal explain, "These employees are hired to kill animals, such as pigs and cows that are largely gentle creatures. Carrying out this action requires workers to disconnect from what they are doing and from the creature standing before them. This emotional dissonance can lead to consequences such as domestic violence, social withdrawal, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse, and PTSD."

Working conditions
Starting in the 1980s, Cargill, Conagra Brands, Tyson Foods and other large food companies moved most slaughterhouse operations to rural areas of the Southern United States which were more hostile to unionization efforts. Slaughterhouses in the United States commonly illegally employ and exploit underage workers and undocumented immigrants. In 2010, Human Rights Watch described slaughterhouse line work in the United States as a human rights crime. In a report by Oxfam America, slaughterhouse workers were observed not being allowed breaks, were often required to wear diapers, and were paid below minimum wage.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Slaughterhouse


text:
Chen Shui-bian

Chen Shui-bian (born 12 October 1950) is a Taiwanese former politician and lawyer who served as the 5th president of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from 2000 to 2008. Chen was the first president from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) which ended the Kuomintang's (KMT) 55 years of continuous rule in Taiwan. He is sometimes referred to by the nickname A-Bian.

A lawyer, Chen entered politics in 1980 during the Kaohsiung Incident as a member of the Tangwai movement and was elected to the Taipei City Council in 1981. He was jailed in 1985 for libel as the editor of the weekly pro-democracy magazine Neo-Formosa, following publication of an article critical of Elmer Fung, a college philosophy professor who was later elected a New Party legislator. After being released, Chen helped found the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in 1986 and was elected a member of the Legislative Yuan in 1989, and Mayor of Taipei in 1994.

Chen won the 2000 presidential election on 18 March with 39% of the vote as a result of a split of factions within the Kuomintang, when James Soong ran for the presidency as an independent against the party nominee Lien Chan, becoming the first non-member of the Kuomintang to hold the office of president. Although Chen received high approval ratings during the first few weeks of his term, his popularity sharply dropped due to alleged corruption within his administration and the inability to pass legislation against the opposition KMT, who controlled the Legislative Yuan. In 2004, he won reelection by a narrow margin after surviving a shooting while campaigning the day before the election. Opponents suspected him of staging the incident for political purposes. However, the case was officially closed in 2005 with all evidence pointing to a single deceased suspect, Chen Yi-hsiung.

In 2009, Chen and his wife Wu Shu-chen were convicted on two bribery charges. Chen was sentenced to 19 years in Taipei Prison, reduced from a life sentence on appeal, but was granted medical parole on 5 January 2015. Chen's supporters have claimed that his trial and sentencing were politically motivated retribution by the Kuomintang for his years in power.

Early years
Chen was born to an impoverished tenant farming family of Zhao'an Min Nan ethnicity in Kuantien Township of Tainan County (now part of Tainan City) on the second day of the ninth lunar month in 1950 but was not formally issued a birth certificate until 18 February 1951, because of doubts that he would survive.

Chen was educated in Mandarin Chinese, which had replaced Japanese as the national language following the end of the Japanese administration of Taiwan. Academically bright from a young age, he graduated from the prestigious National Tainan First Senior High School with honors. In June 1969, he was admitted to National Taiwan University. Initially a business administration major, he switched to law in his first year and became editor of the school's law review. He passed the bar exams before the completion of his junior year with the highest score, becoming Taiwan's youngest lawyer. He graduated in 1974 with an LL.B. in commercial law.

In 1975, he married Wu Shu-chen, the daughter of a physician. The couple have a daughter, Chen Hsing-yu, who is a dentist; and a son, Chen Chih-chung, who, having received a law degree in Taiwan, gained a Master of Laws from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005.

From 1976 to 1989, Chen was a partner in Formosa International Marine and Commercial Law, specializing in maritime insurance. He held the firm's portfolio for Evergreen Marine Corporation.

Entry into politics
Chen became involved in politics in 1980 when he defended the participants of the Kaohsiung Incident in a military court. While his client Huang Hsin-chieh, the leading opposition dissident, and seven co-defendants, including his future Vice President Annette Lu, were found guilty, Chen came to be known for his forceful and colorful arguments. He has stated that it was during this period that he realized the unfairness of the political system in Taiwan and became politically active as a member of the Tangwai movement.

Chen won a seat in the Taipei City Council as a Tangwai candidate in 1981 and served until 1985. In 1984, he founded the pro-opposition Civil Servant Public Policy Research Association, which published a magazine called Neo-Formosa. On 12 January 1985, Chen was sentenced to a year in prison for libel as a result of his editorship of Neo-Formosa, following the publication of an article which claimed that the doctoral dissertation of Elmer Fung, a college philosophy professor (who would later become a New Party legislator), was plagiarized.

While appealing the sentence, he returned to Tainan to run for county magistrate in November 1985. Three days after losing the election, his wife, Wu Shu-chen was hit twice by a hand tractor driven by Chang Jong-tsai as Chen and Wu were thanking their supporters. She was left paralyzed from the waist down. His supporters believed this was part of a government campaign to intimidate him, although another theory says it was a simple traffic accident.

Chen lost his appeal in May 1986 and began serving eight months in the Tucheng Penitentiary along with Huang Tien-fu and Lee I-yang, two other defendants in the case. Whilst in Tucheng the 3 prisoners were also joined for a period of time by Chi Chia-wei a prominent gay rights activist in Taiwan. While he was in prison, his wife campaigned and was elected to the Legislative Yuan. Upon his release in 1987, Chen served as her chief counsel. In May 2022, the Transitional Justice Commission overturned Chen, Huang and Lee's libel charges.

In 1989, Chen was elected to the Legislative Yuan and served as the executive director of the Democratic Progressive Party caucus. With the support of some KMT colleagues, Chen was also elected convener of the National Defense Committee. He was instrumental in laying out and moderating many of the DPP's positions on Taiwan independence, including the four ifs. He was reelected to another three-year term in 1992, but resigned in two years to become mayor.

Taipei mayoralty, 1994–1998
Chen was elected as the mayor of Taipei in 1994, largely as the result of a vote split between the KMT incumbent Huang Ta-chou and the KMT-spin-off New Party (NP) candidate Jaw Shaw-kong. Unable to find experienced bureaucrats from his own party, Chen and his inner circle of young law school graduates retained many of the KMT administrators and delegated considerable authority.

During his term, Chen received accolades for his campaigns to drive illegal gambling and prostitution rackets out of Taipei. He levied large fines on polluters and reformed public works contracts. Chen renamed many of the roads in Taipei, most notably the road which runs between KMT headquarters to the Presidential Palace from Chieh-shou Road (介壽路) to Ketagalan Boulevard in an effort to acknowledge the aboriginal people of the Taipei basin. Chen also made highly publicized evictions of longtime KMT squatters on municipal land, and ordered Chiang Wei-kuo's estate demolished. Chen was also named one of Asia's rising stars, and Taipei became one of the top 50 cities in Asia according to Time Asia magazine.

Despite receiving more votes both in absolute and in percentage terms than his 1994 campaign, Chen lost the mayoral election of 1998 to the KMT's candidate and future president Ma Ying-jeou in large part because the KMT was able to gain the support of New Party supporters. In his first autobiography, "The Son of Taiwan", Chen wrote that he was not entirely upset about losing the re-election as it gave him opportunity to find out what areas in his political career he could improve. For example, he wrote that mainland Chinese people generally approved of his social and economic improvements in Taipei, but they ultimately voted for Ma because of ethnic tensions.

He also traveled extensively nationwide and abroad. In South Korea, he met with president Kim Dae-jung, who presented him with an award. He also met with Japanese prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who promised that he would celebrate if he won the 2000 presidential elections. Due to political complications, this promise was not fulfilled until late 2003.

First term

In an election similar to Taipei's in 1994, Chen won the 2000 presidential election on 18 March 2000, with 39% of the vote as a result of a split of factions within the Kuomintang, when James Soong ran for the presidency as an independent against the party nominee Lien Chan.

Lacking a clear mandate and inheriting a bureaucracy largely loyal to the KMT, Chen tried to reach out to his opposition. He appointed the KMT conservative mainlander Tang Fei, a former general and the incumbent defense minister, as his first premier. Only about half of Chen's original cabinet were DPP members, as few DPP politicians had risen above the local level. Although a supporter of Taiwan independence, Chen moderated his stance during his campaign and pledged the Four Noes and One Without in his inaugural address—that as long as the People's Republic of China has no intention to use military force against Taiwan, he would not declare independence nor change the national symbols of the Republic of China. He also promised to be, "president of all the people" and resigned his chairmanship from the DPP. His approval rating reached around 70%.

Chen's administration ran into many problems, and its policies were constantly blocked by the pan-Blue coalition-controlled legislature. The stock market lost over half its value within a year and unemployment reached 4.5% in part because of the Asian stock market crash. While Chen's detractors blamed Chen's poor leadership for the economic crisis, the administration blamed the legislature for blocking its relief efforts.

More troublesome for Chen was the political showdown over the construction of the Number Four Nuclear Power Facility. This multibillion-dollar project in Gongliao District was already one-third completed and favored by the pro-business KMT as a means of avoiding an energy shortage. However, the environmentalist DPP strongly objected to the expansion of nuclear power. Premier Tang had threatened to resign if the project were canceled, and Chen accepted his resignation on 3 October 2000, only four and a half months after both had taken office. Chen appointed his political ally Chang Chun-hsiung as Tang's replacement. On 27 October, Chang announced that the government would halt construction. But less than an hour earlier, Chen had met with Lien Chan to reconcile differences. Lien had asked Chen to leave the matter for the Legislative Yuan to decide and Chen seemed receptive to the suggestion. When Chang's announcement came out, Lien was furious and the KMT began an effort to recall the president. The Council of Grand Justices intervened and declared that it was the legislature and not the cabinet that had the power to decide on the issue. This was widely seen as the end of Chen's attempts to face the pan-Blue groups head on. By the end of his first year in office, Chen's approval ratings had dropped to 25%.

During the summer of 2001, Chen flew to Los Angeles, Houston, and New York City, where he met with members of the U.S. Congress. The mayor of Houston presented Chen with a key to the city and gave him cowboy clothing. His trip to New York was a first for a head of state from Taiwan as there was unwritten agreement between the US and China that no head of state from Taiwan would be permitted to visit either New York or Washington, D.C.

After his first year in office, Chen moved away from sending conciliatory gestures. In the summer of 2002, Chen again became the chairman of the DPP. During his tenure, images of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo disappeared from public buildings. The word "TAIWAN" is now printed on new ROC passports. Also continuing a trend from the previous administration, the Education Ministry revised the school curriculum to be more Taiwan-centered. Government websites have also tended to promote the notion that China is synonymous with the PRC instead of the ROC as was mandated by the KMT. The "Free China Review" was renamed the Taiwan Review and Who's Who in the ROC was renamed Who's Who in Taiwan. In January 2003, a new Taiwan-Tibet Exchange Foundation was formed but the Cabinet-level Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission was not abolished. Though Chen has proposed talks with the PRC, relations remain deadlocked as Chen refused to pledge to the One-China policy, as required by the PRC for talks to begin. Such a pledge seemed unlikely for Chen since there remained strong opposition within his own party. Despite these symbolic gestures, Chen moved away from "no haste, be patient" policy and opened the three mini links.

Re-election campaign
In late 2003, he signed a controversial referendum bill, which he had supported but was heavily watered down by the pan-Blue majority legislature. One concession that the legislature made was to include a provision for an emergency defensive referendum and during the legislative debates it was widely believed that this clause would only be invoked if Taiwan was under imminent threat of attack from China as has been so often threatened. Within a day of the passage of the referendum bill, Chen stated his intention to invoke this provision, citing PRC's over 450 missiles aimed directly at the Taiwanese. Pan-Blue believed that his bill was only intended to benefit Chen in the coming election, as whether PRC removes the missiles would not be pressured or decided by referendum result.

In October 2003, Chen flew to New York City for a second time. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, he was presented with the Human Rights Award by the International League of Human Rights. In the subsequent leg of the trip to Panama, he met with US Secretary of State Colin Powell and shook hands with him. This high-profile trip raised Chen's standing in opinion polls ahead of his opponent Lien Chan for the first time at 35%, according to Agence France-Presse.

His use of the referendum in combination with his talk of a new constitution lead many among his reunification critics to believe that he would attempt to achieve Taiwan independence in his second term by invoking a referendum to create a new constitution that would formally separate Taiwan from any interpretation of China. This caused the government of the United States to follow the lead of Chen's political critics and issue a rare rebuke of Chen's actions.

Chen was shot in the stomach while campaigning in the city of Tainan on Friday, 19 March 2004, the day before polls opened on Saturday. His vice-president Annette Lu was also reportedly shot in the leg in the same incident. The following day, Chen narrowly won the election with a margin of less than 30,000 votes out of 12.9 million votes counted. Both of his referendum proposals were rejected due to insufficient turnout, in part by the pan-Blue boycott. Those that did vote for the referendum overwhelmingly favored it. Pan-Blue candidate Lien Chan refused to concede and sued both for a recount and for a nullification of the outcome while supporters held a week-long protest led by the pan-Blues front of the presidential office in Taipei. He also claimed that the shooting was staged by Chen to win sympathy votes.

Throughout the election, Chen planned to hold a referendum in 2006 on a new constitution to be enacted upon the accession of the 12th-term president in May 2008. After the election, he sought to reassure critics and moderate supporters that the new constitution would not address the issue of sovereignty, and that the current constitution was in need of comprehensive reform after more than a decade of patchwork revision.

Second term
On 20 May 2004, Chen was sworn in for his second term as president amid continued mass protests by the pan-blue alliance over the validity of his re-election. Having heard protests from pro-independence figures in Taiwan, he did not explicitly re-state the Four Noes and One Without but did state that he reaffirmed the commitments made in his first inaugural. He defended his proposals to change the constitution, but asked for constitutional reform to be undertaken through existing procedures instead of calling for a referendum for an entirely new constitution which was proposed by former president Lee Teng-hui. This would require approval by a three-fourths majority of the National Assembly which could authorize a referendum. This has two major implications. First, by going through existing constitutional amendment procedures, this has the symbolic effect of maintaining continuity with the existing constitution which was originally written in China. Second, this has the practical effect of requiring the Chen administration to get the consent of the opposition pan-Blue coalition to pass any amendments, and while the opposition is willing to consider constitutional reforms that would increase governmental efficiency, they are unlikely to support anything that would imply a de jure declaration of independence.

However, even these seemingly conciliatory gestures did not quell unease by his critics at his election. Some have pointed out that he qualified his statements on the constitution with the statement that this is a personal suggestion. Furthermore, it is widely believed in Taiwan that some of these gestures were essentially forced on him again by pressure from the United States and the PRC. The PRC has stated many times that it cares little about what Chen says, but will watch closely in the next few months to see what he does, a standard sentence that Communist China continues to quote.

Three days before Chen's inauguration, the Taiwan Affairs Office of the PRC issued what has become known as the May 17 Declaration. In that declaration, China accused Chen of continuing with a creep toward independence, having merely paid lip service to his commitments in his first term of office, and reiterated that there would be consequences if Chen did not halt policies toward Taiwan independence, but at the same time offered major concessions if Chen would accept the One China Principle.

In late 2004, in effort to maintain the balance of power in the region, Chen began eagerly pushing for a US$18 billion arms purchase from the United States, but the Pan-Blue Coalition repeatedly blocked the deal in the legislature. Criticism has been made of this, citing contradictory arguments used, such as that the weapons were not what Taiwan needed, or that the weapons were a good idea but too expensive. By late 2006, the KMT had signalled it would support some of the arms sale being approved, but failed to pass a revised arms bill by the end of the legislative session in early 2007, despite promises by then KMT chairman, Ma Ying-jeou, to do that.

Chen announced on 5 December that state-owned or private enterprises and foreign offices bearing the name "China", such as China Airlines, the China Steel Corporation, and Chinese Petroleum Corporation, would be renamed to bear the name "Taiwan." On 14 December 2004, following the failure of the Pan-Green coalition to gain a majority of seats in the 2004 ROC legislative election (as many had expected to occur), Chen resigned as chairman of the DPP. This dashed hopes that the stalemate that plagued Chen's first term would end.

In 2005 Chen became the first ROC president to visit Europe, when he attended the funeral of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican City (the Holy See continues to maintain diplomatic relations with the ROC). In order to shore up diplomatic support, it is common for the ROC president to visit the ROC's remaining diplomatic allies; however, past presidents had been prevented from visiting the Vatican because such a visit would require passage through Italy, which maintains relations with the PRC. Under agreement with the Vatican, Italy permitted all guests to the funeral passage without hindrance and Chen was received at the airport in his capacity as a foreign head of state. In this religious ceremony where U.S. president George W. Bush greeted Iranian president Khatami, Chen did not seem to attempt to a high profile of himself by reaching out to other heads of states such as Bush or British prime minister Tony Blair. Chen was named one of the Time 100 for 2005.

Later in the year, Chen traveled to Miami in stopover for a forum in the Caribbean. He met with members of the U.S. Congress through video conference and was invited to visit Washington, D.C. On his way back, he was originally scheduled to fly through San Francisco. However, he changed course and stopped-over at the United Arab Emirates. The head of state greeted him and hosted a formal state dinner, infuriating the Chinese officials. Chen made his way back after making a stopover at Jakarta. His request for a pitstop at Singapore was denied; authorities cited weather problems.

On 28 February, 2006, Chen announced that the National Unification Council, which was set up in 1990 to create guidelines for unification with China if it adopted democracy, would "cease to function". He took care to use this phrase rather than "abolish" because he had promised during his 2000 campaign that he would not abolish the council or its guidelines. Adam Ereli, deputy spokesman of the US State Department, issued a statement on 2 March 2006, that the understanding of the United States was that the difference between "abolish" and "ceasing activity" implied no change in the status quo.

On 3 May 2006, Chen canceled plans to pass through the United States on his way to Latin America. He was hoping to stop by either San Francisco or New York City to refuel and stay overnight, but the US refused his request instead limiting him to a brief refuelling stopover in Anchorage, Alaska, where Chen would not be allowed to step off the plane. Chen and Taiwan saw this as a snub and led to Chen's cancellation. The trip to Latin America continued, however, without a US stopover. The US State Department claimed that the Alaska stopover offer was consistent with its previous accommodations. However, former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui was granted a visit to Cornell University eleven years earlier. More recently, in addition, Taiwan's leaders have in general been granted permission to stopover in the United States for brief periods before continuing on to other countries. This recent American stance is interpreted by Taiwan to be an expression of the increasing irritation the United States feels towards Taiwan and Chen's seemingly pro-independence gestures. Chen attended the inauguration of Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, one of the few countries that recognized the Republic of China at that time. Laura Bush was also present to represent U.S. president George W. Bush. Chen seized the opportunity, approached her and shook her hands, while Chen's aide produced a camera immediately for an impromptu photo-op. Chen's supporters saw this act as a step forward in Taiwan's struggle for diplomatic recognition, while his detractors claimed that it was a grave breach of international etiquette and put Taiwan to shame. On 12 May 2007, Premier Su Tseng-Chang resigned his position, and Chen soon appointed Chang Chun-hsiung to fill the vacant premiership. During Chen's tenure, beginning in 2000, the country has seen six different premiers in the past seven years. During the same period of time, from 2000 onward, the Democratic Progressive Party has also seen seven different chairmen.

Chen's tenure as president expired on 20 May 2008, yielding to successor Ma Ying-Jeou. From his election to his first term to his last days as president, Chen's approval ratings fell from 79% to just 21%.

Corruption scandals
In May 2006, his approval rating fell to around 20% after a series of scandals centered on his wife and son-in-law. Support from his own party had also dropped with a few prominent members, such as Shih Ming-teh, calling for his resignation in the Million Voices Against Corruption, President Chen Must Go campaign. On 24 May 2006, his son-in-law, Chao Chien-ming, was taken into custody by the Taipei police on charges of insider trading and embezzlement by the opposition party. This was a setback for the Chen Shui-bian administration. In related charges, there were accusations from the opposition party that Chen Shui-bian's wife was involved in trading stocks and obtaining Pacific Sogo Department Store's gift certificates illegally in exchange for settling the disputed ownership.

On 1 June 2006, Chen declared that he was handing control of governmental matters to Premier of the Republic of China, Su Tseng-chang, and announced he would not be involved in campaigning. He also stated that he was retaining authority on matters that the constitution required him to retain authority over, presumably foreign affairs and defense policy, as well as relations with the PRC.

On 20 July 2006, opposition politicians accused that Chen had used a total of NT$10.2 million (US$310,000) worth of "fake invoices" to claim expenses after the National Audit Office found irregularities in presidential office accounts. The Taiwan High Court Prosecutors' Office investigated over this accusation. In a press release, the presidential office responded that the president assured the investigators that he did not pocket a single cent of the fund. During questioning at the presidential Office on the afternoon of 7 August 2006, the president detailed to the prosecutor how he spent the fund and presented relevant receipts and bank remittance statements.

Chen also lost a libel case brought on successfully by PFP chairman James Soong. Soong sued the president after Chen repeatedly accused him of secretly meeting the director of the People's Republic of China's Taiwan Affairs Office. Soong successfully sued Chen for NT$3 million.

On 3 November 2006, Chen's wife Wu Shu-chen and three other high-ranking officials of the Presidential Office were indicted of corruption of NT$14.8 million (US$450,000) of government funds using faked documents. Due to the protection from the constitution against prosecution of the sitting president, Chen could not be prosecuted until he left office, and he was not indicted, but was alleged to be an accomplice on his wife's indictment. The prosecutor of the case indicated that once Chen left office, his office would start the procedures to press charges against Chen. The indictment filed by prosecutors states that the indicted persons obtained government funds earmarked for secret foreign affairs, yet of six supposed secret diplomatic missions, there was sufficient evidence presented for only two. Of the remaining four, it was concluded that one did not exist, and in the case of the other three, the invoices presented were not found to be related to the secret missions.

The pan-Blue coalition, after receiving the news, demanded to call for another recall motion unless Chen resigned immediately. Another small party that backed Chen previously, Taiwan Solidarity Union, said they would likely to support the upcoming recall measure. If the recall had passed, it would have been up to the voters to decide Chen's fate in a referendum.

Leaders of the Democratic Progressive Party met together to discuss the unfavorable charges. The meeting ended when party leaders demanded Chen to explain the accusation within three days. There had long been rumblings inside the DPP that Chen has become their liability and should recall him before the presidential election. If Chen had resigned, he would have been the first Taiwanese president to step down and the vice-president, Annette Lu, would likely have taken power.

After the prosecutor announced the indictment, the campaign leader Shih proclaimed that the indictment was the historical high point in Taiwan and the month-long campaign was a success.

In a press conference 5 November 2006, Chen rebutted the charges against his wife and members of his presidential office. He said that Taiwan government offices advised him to prepare the receipts in such a fashion, and that after six years of doing so, it is strange that they would never mention an irregularity if it was not the right way to do it. He promised that all of the money actually went to diplomatic missions and did not go into any private pockets. Furthermore, he mentioned that when he took office, he thought his salary was so excessive that he cut his own salary in half, and that reduction is more than the amount he is accused of embezzling, so there is no need for him to take that money. In addition, he said that if the charges against his wife were proven in a court of law just as they were charged, then he would at that time step down as President of the Republic of China.

In defense of Chen, journalist Therese Shaheen of The Wall Street Journal Asia pointed out that controversy surrounding Chen can be in part attributed to the radical reforms he has tried to implement since stepping into power.

Recall motion
In mid-June 2007, opposition pan-blue camp lawmakers initiated a recall motion that would allow the voters to remove Chen from power via a public referendum. On 20 June, Chen addressed the nation by television, denying any involvement of the first family or himself (other than his son-in-law) in any of the alleged scandals, or "directly" accepting the department's gift certificates. The motion was not passed. Of 221 lawmakers in the legislature, all 119 pan-blue and independent legislators voted in favor of the measure, 29 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to pass the motion. Pan-Green legislators from the president's own party, the DPP, refused to receive ballots. Pan-Green legislators from the allied TSU cast abstaining ballots. No legislator voted against the recall motion.

After Wu was indicted, the Pan-Blue parties renewed calls to recall Chen, and TSU at first indicated that it would support the recall this time, but then said it would only support the new recall motion if "concrete evidence concerning corruption is presented".

On 1 September 2006, political activist Shih Ming-te launched an anti-corruption campaign. The movement accused Chen of corruption and asked for his resignation. By 7 September, more than one million signatures were collected, each with a donation of NT$100 (approximately US$3.00). On 9 September, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in the streets of Taiwan, wearing red. According to organisers, around 200,000 to 300,000 people joined the protest outside the presidential offices, but the police used aerial photography crowd counting techniques to put the number at about 90,000. Shih Ming-teh confirmed that most of his supporters are from the pan-Blue coalition in a September interview in The New York Times.

2008 elections
In the legislative election in 2008, Chen's party suffered a clear defeat, and Chen subsequently resigned as party chairman. With Chen's resignation and Frank Hsieh's ascension as the party's new chairman, the DPP has changed chairmen seven times since Chen took office in 2000.

In the presidential election on 22 March 2008, Kuomintang candidate Ma Ying-jeou defeated DPP candidate Frank Hsieh.

Post-presidency
Chen stepped down on 20 May 2008, the same day that Ma Ying-jeou took office as the new president of the Republic of China. No longer bearing the title of president, Chen left the Presidential Office Building, and his presidential immunity was removed. He was placed under restrictions, such as confinement to Taiwan, by prosecutors as a result of allegations of corruption and abuse of authority, both of which he was later charged guilty of. One fraud case involved the handling of a special presidential fund used to pursue Taiwan's foreign diplomacy.

President Ma Ying-jeou declassified government documents which aided the investigation into Chen's usage of special government funds. Chen's lawyers responded by suing Ma, on 6 August 2008, alleging Ma's declassification of the documents that were initially classified by Chen to be "politically motivated". The documents consisted mainly of receipts and other records of special expenses, which according to Ma's chief aide assured pose no danger to the country's interests once declassified.

After two years of investigation, it was found that Chen Shui-bian received millions from the owners of the TCC Company after the government bought the Longtan land, which was then integrated into the Science Park project. There were several other incidences of corruption, which became the subject of a graft trial that also included the former president's wife and 11 other co-defendants. The trial revealed that Chen and his wife amassed a total of NT$800 million and some were laundered overseas. The former president was found guilty by the Taipei District Courts of violating Punishment of Corruption Act (貪污治罪條例), Money Laundering Control Act (洗錢防制法), and Criminal Code (刑法).

On 11 September 2009, Chen received a life sentence and was fined NT$200 million (US$6.13 million) for embezzlement, bribery and money laundering involving a total of US$15 million (NT$490 million) in funds while in office from 2000 to 2008. Supporters of Chen contended that the prosecution was politically motivated. Chen is the first ROC president to receive a prison sentence.

On 8 June 2010, the Taipei District Court found Chen not guilty of embezzling diplomatic funds. On 11 June 2010, the High Court decided to reduce Chen's life sentence to 20 years. Through several court cases and pleads for bail, the High Court rejected his request for bail and continued to detain him in jail for another 5 months. The detention led Chen's supporters to protest that the detention of Chen for more than 600 days without proving him guilty was illegal, inhumane and unjust, and a result of political revenge by the part of the Kuomintang (KMT). The Yellow Ribbon Movement took to demonstration over alleged exploitation of justice and political revenge.

Meanwhile, on 17 August 2010, both the Taipei District Court and the High Court found ex-deputy military minister, Ke Cheng-Hen (柯承亨), not guilty of revealing non-military secrets to former president Chen Shui-Bian.

The parliament with a KMT and pan-Blue coalition majority passed an amendment to the "preferential treatment for retired presidents and vice presidents act" (卸任總統副總統禮遇條例) on 19 August 2010. Introduced by the KMT, the amendment stipulated that former presidents and vice presidents will be stripped of courtesy treatment, including their monthly allowance and annual expenses, if convicted by a court of grave offense(s), such as sedition and graft. The number of bodyguards assigned to former presidents and vice presidents who are convicted of corruption in a first trial will also be reduced. Former president Chen's son stated the act was created to target the now imprisoned former president.

In 2016, the United States Department of Justice stated it will return "approximately $1.5 million to Taiwan, the proceeds of the sale of a forfeited New York condominium and a Virginia residence that the United States alleged in its complaint were purchased with the proceeds of bribes."

Health and medical parole
In September 2012, Chen was admitted to Taoyuan General Hospital after complaints of having difficulty urinating, where it was concluded that he had suffered from a minor stroke. He was subsequently transferred to the Taipei Veterans General Hospital for further testing, where he was diagnosed with sleep apnea, severe depression and other cognitive disorders. His symptoms included stuttering and memory loss.

He attempted suicide on Sunday, 2 June 2013. In January 2015, Chen was released from prison on medical parole due to his ailing (but undiagnosed) condition.

His time spent under medical parole does not count toward his prison sentence. Part of the terms of his medical parole stipulate that he cannot participate in public political discussions. In January 2021, he started a radio show of non-political nature. Some people called this issue out because Chen Shui-bian appeared to be in perfect health.

Position on Taiwan's political status
In 1999, the Democratic Progressive Party amended its charter to regard Taiwan as already independent as the ROC, and therefore it was unnecessary to declare independence. In his 2000 inauguration speech, Chen struck a more moderate tone and pledged to the Four Noes and One Without: that as long as the PRC did not intend to use military force against Taiwan, he would not declare independence, change the name of the country to "Republic of Taiwan", push for the inclusion of "special state-to-state relations" in the Constitution, or promote a referendum on independence. In addition, he pledged not to abolish the National Unification Council. However, in August 2002, frustrated by a lack of reciprocation from the PRC, he described the relationship as "one country on each side" and initiated a referendum on cross-strait relations in 2004, returning to a more confrontational stance.

In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, Chen reiterated the DPP stance that Taiwan was already independent.

Post-presidency, Chen has expressed his wishes to one day visit the village in Fujian which his ancestors migrated from in the 18th century. In 2018, Chen, along with Lee Teng-hui, expressed support for a Formosa Alliance plan to amend the referendum act to allow for a 2019 referendum on de jure independence, though neither goal was realized by the planned date.

title: Chen Shui-bian