He faced a death sentence with his hands in his pockets, and a smile.

Twenty-five years in prison bought Taiwan its freedom.
The fight for that freedom is not over.

Shih Ming Te (1941–2024) spent twenty-five years behind bars — three sentences, across three decades — under the dictatorship that ruled Taiwan. No political prisoner in the island’s history endured longer. His crime was a single idea: that the people of a small island had the right to govern themselves, and to do it without hatred.

In 1980, tried for his life before a military court, he stood with his hands in his pockets and smiled — so that a frightened people might find the courage to stand too. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, twice. When he finally walked free in 1990, after a hunger strike of four years and seven months, he did not call for revenge. He turned to a world full of suffering and said:

“Endurance is not enough; there must be forgiveness.”

Why his life speaks to you — and why now

Shih Ming Te was not only a Taiwanese fighting for Taiwan. From a courtroom where he expected to be shot, he invoked the same right that America’s founders had claimed two centuries before — that people “have the right to overthrow any type of tyrannical rule that might be imposed upon them.” He called himself a man of two missions: to free his own people, and, as “a citizen of the world on equal footing,” to work for peace among all humanity.

He saw clearly what many are only now admitting. Across the decades since 1979, the wager that engagement would soften Beijing has failed; a closed and hardening dictatorship now presses on the free world, and on the Strait he spent his life trying to keep at peace. Shih read that trajectory early, and named it plainly, when it was dangerous to do so.

Now the generation that witnessed his fight is passing. Their letters, testimony, and records are fading in drawers and boxes. If we do not gather them now, they will be lost — and a moral resource the democratic world cannot afford to lose will vanish with them.

That is why this foundation exists. And why we are asking for your help today.

What your gift does

Your donation to the Shih Ming Te Foundation North America goes to three concrete things:

• We preserve the record. We are collecting, digitizing, and safeguarding the primary sources of Taiwan’s democratic struggle — Shih Ming Te’s own writings and the testimony of those who lived it — before the witnesses and their papers are gone.
  
  
• We fund the next generation of scholars. We award fellowships and grants to undergraduates, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and scholars at universities studying Taiwan’s democratization and its place in international affairs — and we sustain lectures, prizes, and public forums that carry this history into the classroom and the public square.
  
  
• We defend the democratic way of life. We keep the ideas he lived for — self-government, human rights, non-violence, forgiveness, reconciliation — in active circulation among the people best placed to carry them forward.

The ask

Shih Ming Te Foundation North America is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Your gift is tax-deductible to the full extent allowed by law.

He gave twenty-five years. We are asking for a fraction of an afternoon’s earnings — and for his name to live in English at last.

Close

He never asked to be pitied. He asked to be understood, and he trusted the verdict of time. From the dock in 1980 he wrote:

“Each era has its devotees… They know full well that their path is a lonely, difficult, miserable and bloody one… but the winding paths that they pass over will be trampled into broad avenues by the feet of those who come after them.”

We are the feet that come after. Walk the road with us.

With respect and resolve,

Jessica Gina Chen Shih

Chairperson, Shih Ming Te Foundation North America