The New York Times ran a major feature about Prince of Tears (淚王子), a movie set in 1950s Taiwan that exposes the brutality of the White Terror, which may surprise readers in the US who know little about Taiwan’s bloody past.

The Hong Kong-datelined report, published on Tuesday, opens: “The story usually goes like this: China was taken over by Chairman Mao [Zedong (毛澤東)] and became a brutal Communist state. Taiwan broke free and became a vibrant democracy. The ugliness of the last half-century — persecution, martial law, mass execution — happened on the mainland.”