Former Korea Times Managing Editor Honored in Taiwan
By Michael Ha
Staff Reporter
The late Choi Byung-woo, former managing editor of The Korea Times who died while covering Taiwan's Quemoy Island Battle in 1958, is being honored by the island nation.
Over the past weekend, a memorial tablet for Choi was permanently placed in Taiwan's National Shrine, along with memorials honoring five other war correpondents who died during the battle.
Choi had served as the managing editor of The Korea Times for two years before he traveled to Quemoy to cover the unfolding military conflict. Before arriving at the island, he was in Indonesia covering that country's civil war.
On Sept. 26, 1958, he was aboard a military landing craft along with several other war reporters when the craft capsized near the island's coast. In all, six journalists and five Taiwanese soldiers lost their lives. Choi was only 34 years old at the time.
This is the first time that a non-Taiwanese national is being honored at the National Shrine, a place equivalent to the National Cemetery in Korea.
``The only reason that Taiwan has been able to make progress and take a path toward becoming a democratic nation is because Taiwan defended Quemoy Island at that time,'' said Zhang zha-shang, a Taiwanese journalist who had covered the fierce battle that year.
``It's appropriate that the journalists who died reporting this critical battle to the outside world are being enshrined and honored,'' Zhang told Korean media.
In the Quemoy battle, Mao Zedong's forces fired half a million artillery shells at the main Quemoy island and nearby islets in a 44-day bombardment. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops managed to hold on and resisted Beijing's attempts to bring it under its fold. Next month marks the 50th anniversary of the conflict.
The pioneering journalist was managing editor for The Korea Times from July 1956 until his death in September 1958. The nation's first English daily newspaper was only six years old when Choi took the top editing job. He was passionate about his work and was a leading figure in Korea's fledgling journalism community in the 1950s. Choi was also a founder of the Kwanhun Club, now one of the oldest organizations representing senior Korean journalists.
The late Kim Byong-kook, a former columnist for The Korea Times, said ``Choi was a born journalist and has landed in the vocation best suited to his natural temperament and endowment,'' in the book, ``History of English-Language Newspapers in Korea.'' ``He was a voracious reader and his interest covered a wide range of subjects including history, political science, economics, and physical sciences. His intellectual appetite was almost insatiable.''