A number of events are to be held across the nation over the next few weeks to commemorate the 68th anniversary of the 228 Incident, an anti-government uprising and subsequent brutal crackdown that occurred in 1947.
Two memorial services will be held at the 228 Peace Memorial Park in Taipei on Saturday, while music performances will staged at the plaza in front of the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum every day from today to Saturday, the 228 Memorial Foundation said.
Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) and Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) are scheduled to attend one of the memorial services, which will include a concert to commemorate the victims and their families, the Taiwan Nation Alliance said.
For the third consecutive year, university students will stage music and theater performances at Liberty Square in front of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, alongside exhibitions and accounts of the event by academics and victims and their families.
In Chiayi, a memorial service and a concert are planned for tomorrow. An exhibition of images and documents from the Incident will also open tomorrow and run until March 22 at the Chiayi 228 Memorial Park Museum.
Other memorial services will be held in Kaohsiung, New Taipei City, Taichung, Tainan, Greater Taoyuan, Pingtung and Yunlin on Saturday and in Keelung on March 8.
“228 is not a three-day holiday for people to go out and travel,” Lin Wei-lien (林偉聯), a pastor and officer of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and a member of the Taiwan Nation Alliance, said yesterday at a press conference at which the events were announced.
He said he hopes the memorial services and exhibitions will educate young people and children about the Incident and help to ensure that such a tragedy does not occur again in Taiwan.
Although the government has apologized many times, it is still unclear who should be held accountable for the massacre and how many people died during that period, according to Hsueh Hua-yuan (薛化元), director of National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan History and the Taiwan 228 Care Association.
The official documents show discrepancies regarding the whereabouts of some people, he added.
“Forgiveness is only possible when the truth has been uncovered and the lessons of history have been learned,” said Hsueh, calling for more research to shed light on the Incident.
It is estimated that tens of thousands of Taiwanese, many of them members of the intellectual elite, were killed during the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s crackdown on the uprising, which began on Feb. 28, 1947, 16 months after Japan’s colonial rule over Taiwan ended.
The crackdown was prelude to nearly four decades of martial law.
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday said it is fully aware of the situation following reports that the son of ousted Chinese politician Bo Xilai (薄熙來) has arrived in Taiwan and is to marry a Taiwanese. Local media reported that Bo Guagua (薄瓜瓜), son of the former member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, is to marry the granddaughter of Luodong Poh-Ai Hospital founder Hsu Wen-cheng (許文政). The pair met when studying abroad and arranged to get married this year, with the wedding breakfast to be held at The One holiday resort in Hsinchu
The Taipei Zoo on Saturday said it would pursue legal action against a man who was filmed climbing over a railing to tease and feed spotted hyenas in their enclosure earlier that day. In videos uploaded to social media on Saturday, a man can be seen climbing over a protective railing and approaching a ledge above the zoo’s spotted hyena enclosure, before dropping unidentified objects down to two of the animals. The Taipei Zoo in a statement said the man’s actions were “extremely inappropriate and even illegal.” In addition to monitoring the hyenas’ health, the zoo would collect evidence provided by the public
‘SIGN OF DANGER’: Beijing has never directly named Taiwanese leaders before, so China is saying that its actions are aimed at the DPP, a foundation official said National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) yesterday accused Beijing of spreading propaganda, saying that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had singled out President William Lai (賴清德) in his meeting with US President Joe Biden when talking about those whose “true nature” seek Taiwanese independence. The Biden-Xi meeting took place on the sidelines of the APEC summit in Peru on Saturday. “If the US cares about maintaining peace across the Taiwan Strait, it is crucial that it sees clearly the true nature of Lai and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in seeking Taiwanese independence, handles the Taiwan question with extra
A road safety advocacy group yesterday called for reforms to the driver licensing and retraining system after a pedestrian was killed and 15 other people were injured in a two-bus collision in Taipei. “Taiwan’s driver’s licenses are among the easiest to obtain in the world, and there is no mandatory retraining system for drivers,” Taiwan Vision Zero Alliance, a group pushing to reduce pedestrian fatalities, said in a news release. Under the regulations, people who have held a standard car driver’s license for two years and have completed a driver training course are eligible to take a test
RSS