Tomorrow mark’s the 65th anniversary of the 228 Incident. Unfortunately, a recent opinion piece by former premier Hau Pei-tsun (郝柏村), which claimed the number of people killed during the massacre was far less than the figure noted in textbooks, discounted long-term efforts in seeking delayed justice for victims and their families.
In the article, published in the Chinese-language United Daily News on Tuesday, Hau questioned the description of the 228 Incident in junior-high history textbooks, which says Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops killed more than 10,000 people during the uprising. He said the number of people who were killed or went missing was little more than 500.
Even after the government lowered the threshold for compensation for victims’ families, the number increased to only about 1,000, he said.
Hau said he spoke as an authority on the subject because while he was premier in the early 1990s he had instructed the Cabinet to form a panel and study the massacre. This was the figure the panel had agreed on, and the Ministry of Education should correct the textbooks, he said.
Hau seems to have forgotten that the investigation presented by the panel stated that the number of people who were killed or went missing during the incident was between 18,000 and 28,000, and that the conclusion was reached after much research.
Even today, the 228 Incident is seen as a complex issue with few easy answers, and the pain of victims and their families has never stopped during efforts to uncover the truth.
Hau’s comment ahead of the anniversary were unacceptable to both the victims’ families and society as a whole, and merely rubbed salt into old wounds.
What he denied in his article was not only the true number of the dead and missing, but the historical context of the 228 Incident, while ignoring the long struggle by Taiwanese to piece together the facts of what actually happened.
Views on the origin of the 228 Incident are widely divergent. While President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has vowed on numerous occasions to make a full effort to uncover the truth and ease the pain of victims’ families, his administration has so far failed to discover anything new, and has in fact only stressed the number of Mainlanders affected, while no one involved in the incident has stepped forward to offer an apology to the victims or the public.
When attending an exhibition on Friday in memory of members of the judiciary killed in the massacre, Ma dismissed Hau’s comments and stressed that “the focus should not be on the number of people that were killed,” as he reiterated the promise to uncover the truth behind the crackdown.
Ma is at least correct in this: The number of the victims is not the most important issue regarding the massacre. The biggest problem is that there remains no accountability, and the truth remains unknown.
In the file on the 228 Massacre in the National Security Bureau’s archive, for example, there is a list of individuals who went missing, but no mention of the dates of their deaths or the reasons why they were detained.
As Wang Ke-shao (王克紹), whose father was taken by the KMT regime during the incident and never returned home, said when attending the same exhibition as Ma, what most families of the victims wanted to know is when and where their loved ones died, and what crimes they were accused of.
In the absence of the truth behind the massacre, and in view of people like Hau who continue to whitewash what happened, the best we can do is to ensure that the rationalization of murder and indifference to the suffering of the victims and their families never goes unopposed.
It is employment pass renewal season in Singapore, and the new regime is dominating the conversation at after-work cocktails on Fridays. From September, overseas employees on a work visa would need to fulfill the city-state’s new points-based system, and earn a minimum salary threshold to stay in their jobs. While this mirrors what happens in other countries, it risks turning foreign companies away, and could tarnish the nation’s image as a global business hub. The program was announced in 2022 in a bid to promote fair hiring practices. Points are awarded for how a candidate’s salary compares with local peers, along
China last month enacted legislation to punish —including with the death penalty — “die-hard Taiwanese independence separatists.” The country’s leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), need to be reminded about what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has said and done in the past. They should think about whether those historical figures were also die-hard advocates of Taiwanese independence. The Taiwanese Communist Party was established in the Shanghai French Concession in April 1928, with a political charter that included the slogans “Long live the independence of the Taiwanese people” and “Establish a republic of Taiwan.” The CCP sent a representative, Peng
Japan and the Philippines on Monday signed a defense agreement that would facilitate joint drills between them. The pact was made “as both face an increasingly assertive China,” and is in line with Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr’s “effort to forge security alliances to bolster the Philippine military’s limited ability to defend its territorial interests in the South China Sea,” The Associated Press (AP) said. The pact also comes on the heels of comments by former US deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger, who said at a forum on Tuesday last week that China’s recent aggression toward the Philippines in
The Ministry of National Defense on Tuesday announced that the military would hold its annual Han Kuang exercises from July 22 to 26. Military officers said the exercises would feature unscripted war games, and a decentralized command and control structure. This year’s exercises underline the recent reforms in Taiwan’s military as it transitions from a top-down command structure to one where autonomy is pushed down to the front lines to improve decisionmaking and adaptability. Militaries around the world have been observing and studying Russia’s war in Ukraine. They have seen that the Ukrainian military has been much quicker to adapt to