As it has been in previous years, this year’s 228 Incident anniversary was commemorated with tears, apologies and defaced statues of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石). However, there was something new this year — insensitivity and a lack of compassion.
The 228 Incident in 1947 has been, and will remain, one of the most indelible wounds in the nation’s history. Tens of thousands of people were slaughtered by the then-authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
Some hard-line KMT supporters have argued that Chiang’s regime only did what it had to do to ensure national security and its legitimacy at a turbulent time.
However, nothing can justify taking a life, let alone — as many historians have estimated — more than 10,000 people, who were wiped out simply because they had different ideas or for no “proper reason” at all.
While there is debate over the exact number of people massacred, no one doubts that the families of those tortured, kidnapped, or executed by the regime are forever shadowed by the pain of losing their loved ones.
That is why the comments made by former KMT legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) about the emotional speech on Sunday by Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) — during a 520km bicycle ride from the nation’s northernmost tip to its southernmost tip — are unbearable.
Ko, whose grandfather was left disabled after reportedly being tortured by KMT troops during the 228 Incident and died three years later, was overwhelmed by emotion multiple times as he spoke, marking the 69th anniversary of the Incident.
“According to the government-funded Memorial Foundation of 228, the actual number of 228 Incident victims stood at 2,253, including 681 deaths, 177 people who went missing and 1,395 people who were detained or imprisoned,” Tsai said on Facebook on Sunday.
“It means that a vast number of the so-called ‘victims’ were simply people who had been detained [by KMT troops]... Ko claims that his grandfather had also been subjected to detention, so it made him a victim. That is why he had to fake cry,” Tsai said.
Tsai also shrugged off DPP Legislator Chen Chi-mai’s (陳其邁) proposal to criminalize derogatory remarks about the 228 Massacre, saying what really should be outlawed are comments that blow the Incident out of proportion.
While Tsai has long been ill-reputed for his loose tongue, making light of the pains or emotional wounds sustained by families of victims in one of the nation’s darkest chapters of its history should be a red line that nobody is allowed to cross.
KMT Acting Chairperson Huang Min-hui (黃敏惠) blasted president-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) pledge to establish a “truth-finding and reconciliation committee” as an opportunistic attempt to aggravate ethnic divisions between Taiwanese and Chinese.
On the one hand, Huang urged Tsai Ing-wen to refrain from cashing in on the 228 Massacre, while on the other she called for a new probe of the “319 shooting incident” — which refers to an attack on then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and then-vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) in Tainan on March 19, 2004, one day before the presidential election.
The reason people have repeatedly called for the declassification of official documents from the White Terror era is because truth is the only thing that can bring closure.
Without the restoration of historical fact and the identification of perpetrators, Taiwan cannot achieve transitional justice and 288 Incident victims’ families can never make peace with the past.
While it might be hard for some KMT members to relate to the 228 Incident victims, the least the party can do is show respect and compassion to the victims’ families.
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercises, the largest naval exercise in the region, are aimed at deepening international collaboration and interaction while strengthening tactical capabilities and flexibility in tackling maritime crises. China was invited to participate in RIMPAC in 2014 and 2016, but it was excluded this year. The underlying reason is that Beijing’s ambitions of regional expansion and challenging the international order have raised global concern. The world has made clear its suspicions of China, and its exclusion from RIMPAC this year will bring about a sea change in years to come. The purpose of excluding China is primarily
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the