Defection of Chinese Air Force Fighter Pilot to Taiwan Propaganda Movie 59124 (1977)

Synopsis

FLYING TO FREEDOM documents the 1977 defection by a pilot in China’s People’s Liberation Army Air Force. On July 7, 1977, Cmdr. Fan Yuanyan of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force flew his MiG-19 from Jinjiang, Fujian, in the communist People’s Republic of China to Tainan, Taiwan. The timing of this defection, which also came as U.S. President Jimmy Carter was moving decisively toward normalization of relations with the PRC, made Fan an anti-communist star in Taiwan and the U.S.A. (It also happened to be the 40th anniversary of the beginning of China’s war with Japan, another propaganda plus.) Fan Yuanyan was one of the eighteen prominent defectors 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. While he spoke for years afterward on behalf of the “800 million mainland compatriots” who he felt wanted the Taiwan-based Republic of China to retake the mainland, even as he also became more and more critical of the excesses of capitalism and liberalism in Taiwan. Professor Andrew Morris Morris has suggested that Fan represented a changing understanding of the role of defectors in the long struggle between China and Tawian, and the ways that Taiwanese people saw their mainland “compatriots” as Taiwan society was beginning to…

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Details

Running time

23 minutes

Language

English

Collection

Ephemeral Films

Subjects on the Internet Archive

• Stock Footage