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.
The gutting of Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA) by US President Donald Trump’s administration poses a serious threat to the global voice of freedom, particularly for those living under authoritarian regimes such as China. The US — hailed as the model of liberal democracy — has the moral responsibility to uphold the values it champions. In undermining these institutions, the US risks diminishing its “soft power,” a pivotal pillar of its global influence. VOA Tibetan and RFA Tibetan played an enormous role in promoting the strong image of the US in and outside Tibet. On VOA Tibetan,
Former minister of culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台) has long wielded influence through the power of words. Her articles once served as a moral compass for a society in transition. However, as her April 1 guest article in the New York Times, “The Clock Is Ticking for Taiwan,” makes all too clear, even celebrated prose can mislead when romanticism clouds political judgement. Lung crafts a narrative that is less an analysis of Taiwan’s geopolitical reality than an exercise in wistful nostalgia. As political scientists and international relations academics, we believe it is crucial to correct the misconceptions embedded in her article,
Sung Chien-liang (宋建樑), the leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) efforts to recall Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lee Kun-cheng (李坤城), caused a national outrage and drew diplomatic condemnation on Tuesday after he arrived at the New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office dressed in a Nazi uniform. Sung performed a Nazi salute and carried a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf as he arrived to be questioned over allegations of signature forgery in the recall petition. The KMT’s response to the incident has shown a striking lack of contrition and decency. Rather than apologizing and distancing itself from Sung’s actions,
US President Trump weighed into the state of America’s semiconductor manufacturing when he declared, “They [Taiwan] stole it from us. They took it from us, and I don’t blame them. I give them credit.” At a prior White House event President Trump hosted TSMC chairman C.C. Wei (魏哲家), head of the world’s largest and most advanced chip manufacturer, to announce a commitment to invest US$100 billion in America. The president then shifted his previously critical rhetoric on Taiwan and put off tariffs on its chips. Now we learn that the Trump Administration is conducting a “trade investigation” on semiconductors which