As Taiwanese readied to observe the 66th anniversary of the 228 Massacre last week, many were angered when it emerged that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), at the behest of a descendant of a perpetrator, had sent a letter to Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History asking it to uncover the “real facts” behind the incident.
For critics, Ma’s request was regarded as an attempt to rewrite, possibly with the intent of whitewashing the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) responsibility, a dark, albeit defining, chapter in the nation’s history.
While further studying of the causes, impact and future consequences of the massacre and the decades of the equally murderous White Terror that ensued, should be encouraged, it is shocking that, 66 years on, people in Taiwan, including Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), can still question who bears ultimate responsibility — Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), governor Chen Yi (陳儀), unruly KMT soldiers, corrupt government officials or Taiwanese “thugs” — or how many people were slain, which is proof that the story is incomplete.
There are two main reasons why a full understanding of the massacre, or incident, depending on one’s point of view, remains elusive to this day.
First and foremost, while the KMT has apologized, and compensation has been made to some families of the victims, Taiwan has not gone through a systematic process of truth and reconciliation, as experienced in South Africa following the abolition of apartheid, nor has it undergone the kind of lustration that followed the fall of communism in the former Czech Republic. Consequently, healing remains incomplete.
A second and related factor is the lack of access to all the government documents from that period. Under prevailing regulations, case files can only be seen at the request of direct family members of victims of the massacre.
With several families unwilling to reopen the wounds of this painful era or, for various reasons, uninterested in doing so, the result is that several cases will never see the light of day, and thus preclude historians from piecing together a thorough picture of the events. Academics, historians and journalists with no family connection to victims cannot, on their own, see such files.
To be fair to the Ma administration, those regulations were not altered under previous KMT governments, or — and this is noteworthy — during the eight years of the Democratic Progressive Party administration. Part of the reason is that the case files are still treated as classified documents, the time-tried excuse used by public security and military agencies the world over to keep past misdeeds away from scrutiny.
One possible reason is that the actual role of the perpetrators and the severity of their acts may be much greater than what is commonly known, which in turn could result in calls for far greater compensation to the families of victims.
Ma can ask academics to take a fresh look at the events leading to and during the 228 Massacre, but as long as laws regulating access to the complete body of files are not changed, it will be impossible for the nation to really understand what happened and to fully comprehend the scope of human catastrophe. Making all the files public is the only way to uncover the truth.
Only then can it be determined, with a comfortable degree of certitude, whether individuals such as Peng Meng-chi (彭孟緝), also known as the “Kaohsiung butcher,” have been wronged by history, as his son now claims, or if they deserve such titles for ordering the murder of several Taiwanese.
Above all, the historical truth is what the nation needs to heal its wounds and rid itself of the source of a constant divide that prevents it from moving, of one heart, into the future.
World leaders are preparing themselves for a second Donald Trump presidency. Some leaders know more or less where he stands: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows that a difficult negotiation process is about to be forced on his country, and the leaders of NATO countries would be well aware of being complacent about US military support with Trump in power. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be feeling relief as the constraints placed on him by the US President Joe Biden administration would finally be released. However, for President William Lai (賴清德) the calculation is not simple. Trump has surrounded himself
US president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named US Representative Mike Waltz, a vocal supporter of arms sales to Taiwan who has called China an “existential threat,” as his national security advisor, and on Thursday named US Senator Marco Rubio, founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a global, cross-party alliance to address the challenges that China poses to the rules-based order — as his secretary of state. Trump’s appointments, including US Representative Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the UN, who has been a strong supporter of Taiwan in the US Congress, and Robert Lighthizer as US trade
Following the BRICS summit held in Kazan, Russia, last month, media outlets circulated familiar narratives about Russia and China’s plans to dethrone the US dollar and build a BRICS-led global order. Each summit brings renewed buzz about a BRICS cross-border payment system designed to replace the SWIFT payment system, allowing members to trade without using US dollars. Articles often highlight the appeal of this concept to BRICS members — bypassing sanctions, reducing US dollar dependence and escaping US influence. They say that, if widely adopted, the US dollar could lose its global currency status. However, none of these articles provide
On Friday last week, tens of thousands of young Chinese took part in a bike ride overnight from Henan Province’s Zhengzhou (鄭州) to the historical city of Kaifeng in search of breakfast. The night ride became a viral craze after four female university students in June chronicled their ride on social media from Zhengzhou in search of soup dumplings in Kaifeng. Propelled by the slogan “youth is priceless,” the number of nocturnal riders surged to about 100,000 on Friday last week. The main road connecting the two cities was crammed with cyclists as police tried to maintain order. That sparked
RSS