Veteran Hong Kong kung fu star Jimmy Wang Yu has told a Taiwanese daily he was asked by the island's then ruling Kuomintang to assassinate a Taiwanese dissident who was living in exile in the US in the 1980s.
Wang told the Liberty Times that the target was Hsu Hsin-liang, who had promoted a 'people's revolution' to overthrow the then KMT government and fled to the US in 1979 during the party's suppression of political dissidents.
'At that time, through a third party, the mainland affairs director of the KMT, Pai Wan-hsiang, asked if I could do something for the country and hoped that I could get rid of Hsu Hsin-liang,' the newspaper quoted Wang as saying.
Wang said that in the end, the plan had been aborted, adding that years later he read that Henry Liu, a biographer and long-time critic of then Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-kuo, had been shot dead at his US home. He alleged that the KMT masterminded the 1984 killing.
Wang, 63, best known for his role in the 1969 movie One-Armed Swordsman, settled in Taiwan a decade or so ago. He was not available for comment yesterday.
Mr Hsu, who later became the chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party before breaking ranks with it, declined to comment on the report.