英文摘要
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On the evening of November 11^th 1946, a court police and a prison guard with arrest warrant were shot by a policeman in the Police Department of Yuanlin in Taichung County. Taichung County Police Department showed an astonishing lack of concern for court orders. It was the so-called the Yuanlin Incident. This single incident was not only an index to observe the social order of Taiwan after the World War II, but also a clear example to show the differences between two legal cultures-Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule and Republican China.With the help of related archives, newspapers and magazines, and diaries, this paper delineates and discusses the whole incident, and tries to explicate the causes behind the incident. How could the Police Department defy the injunctions of the court? Presumably it was the superficial application of the modem law of jurisdiction to Republican China that caused the incident. The court worked only on the surface in Republican China. The Taiwanese ruled by Japanese could not understand why judiciary under the Kuomintang Rule was rather weak and unrespected. Before the Incident, it was quite common to see soldiers or policemen violate laws and disciplines. But, this incident was a great shock to the society. The authority gained by the court during the Japanese colonial period was suddenly put in jeopardy. Furthermore, it was too daring for any administrative organization to refuse to take orders from the judge and the prosecutor. Such defiance of the law simply could not be tolerated. The behaviors and the speech of the administrative authorities led the local intellectuals and elites to initiate a series of ”law-protecting” actions. By means of public lectures and petitions, they requested that the government should face the problem immediately and should also be ruled by law so that the life of people in general could be protected and Taiwan's judicial independence could be maintained.
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