Chang Liyi

Chang Liyi (; 7 November 1929 – 12 June 2019), also known as Jack Chang, was a pilot in the Republic of China Air Force with the rank of major. A member of the CIA-trained Black Cat Squadron, he flew the American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft to spy on China's nuclear program. He was shot down on 10 January 1965 over Baotou, Inner Mongolia, and held in detention until late 1969. After being released from custody, Chang was sent back to his hometown on the mainland. In 1982 he was given permission to leave the mainland, but Taiwan refused to allow him entry until 1990, and he lived in the United States with his family in the interim.

Early life Chang was born in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, on 7 November 1929. After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese army attacked Nanjing in December 1937. Chang's mother fled the city with the children and trekked across China for more than a year, eventually arriving in the wartime capital Chongqing in 1939. His father, who stayed behind to look after his shop, died in the Nanjing Massacre.

In 1943, the Republic of China Air Force established a youth training school in Dujiangyan, Sichuan. Chang, determined to join the military, took the entrance examination and was admitted the next year. In the late 1950s, the United States and the Republic of China government in Taiwan initiated a top-secret reconnaissance program to spy on Communist China's nuclear bomb project. To reach the project sites located deep inland in Northwest China, ROC pilots were trained by the Central Intelligence Agency in the United States to fly the Lockheed U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft. Chang was selected to receive U-2 training and joined the Black Cat Squadron in July 1964 with the rank of major. his plane was shot down by a surface-to-air missile launched by the 1st Battalion of the People's Liberation Army Air Force under the command of Wang Lin.

In April 1965, four U-2 aircraft were shot down by China, including the U-2C piloted by Chang, were put on display at the Military Museum of the Chinese People's Revolution in Beijing. Decades later, Chang was invited and brought to the museum to see the wreckage of his plane. at Songshan Hospital in Taipei. He was 89.

Personal life In 1956, Chang Liyi married Chang Chia-chi , a fellow native of Nanjing, and they had three children. Eight years after he was shot down in 1965 and declared dead in Taiwan, she married an army officer. Still not fully convinced that Liyi was dead, she made an agreement with her second husband that she would reunite with Liyi if he would ever come back. In 1983, she met with Liyi in Hong Kong following his release from China, and expressed her guilt for having remarried while he remained single in China. After he was given permission to return to Taiwan, she divorced her second husband and remarried Liyi in April 1991. She died in August 2003 from kidney disease.