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.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS