Squadron commander Fan Yuanyan 范園焱 was one of the eighteen prominent defectors 反共義士 from China during the period 1960-1989. He was 41 and flew a Shenyang F-6, the Chinese version of the Soviet MIG-19, to Taiwan. He was made a lieutenant colonel in Taiwan’s air force and received $600,000 in gold as a reward for his defection. Fan, though, came to feel uneasy about life in Taiwan.
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Andrew Morris is Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. He is author of Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (2004) and Colonial Project, National Game: A History of Baseball in Taiwan (2010), and editor of Japanese Taiwan: Colonial Rule and Its Contested Legacy (2015).
This event was co-sponsored by the East Asia Studies Center and the Department of History.