The Taipei Railroad

When Lei Chen, 63, publisher of Formosa's wistfully ineffective opposition Free China Fortnightly, in August announced plans to start a China Democratic Party to give the Kuomintang its first real opposition (TIME, Sept. 19), the authorities apparently decided to arrest him first on sedition charges and then see what proof they could find. They also arrested his business manager, Ma Chih-su, 38, and his former accountant and secretary, quiet, moody Liu Tzu-ying, 54. Without waiting for the trial, the government's Central Daily News laid out the government's case. Secretary Liu had confessed, reported the News, that before Nanking fell in 1949 he was chairman of the city's Communist Party headquarters. Subsequently he decided to go to Formosa to spy for the Communists. He informed his boss Lei Chen of his mission, and Lei Chen even used his own Hong Kong bank account to collect remittances for Liu Tzu-ying from the Communists on the mainland.

Last week the three went on trial in Taipei. First witness up was Secretary Liu, who did not testify as the News had promised. He admitted only that he had stayed in Nanking after the fall of the city, and had talked with the wife of former (1939-42) Nationalist Ambassador to Moscow Shao Li-tze, who subsequently defected to the Communists. He promised her that he would carry on Communist propaganda work once he reached Formosa. But he said that when he told Publisher Lei of his plans, Lei warned him that the security was too strict, so he did nothing subversive.

Taking the stand in his own defense, Publisher Lei--who never denied befriending Liu as a refugee--denied knowing that Liu was a Communist agent. The real issue, said Lei, was whether the government could get away with such a "smear" of honest critics. "All we wished to do is urge the government to implement peaceful reform in order to avoid bloodshed. If the charges against me can be substantiated, I need not mourn my personal fate. But I must mourn the future of my country."

Lei might have saved his breath. At week's end the military court found all three men guilty, sentenced elderly Publisher Lei Chen to ten years' imprisonment with an additional seven years' deprivation of citizenship rights, sufficient to keep him out of politics until 1977.

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