Attempts at achieving a form of transitional justice to deal with the fissures brought on by the nation’s complex colonial past are foundering, in no small part due to the lack of an agreement of what is to be preserved, what the goal of a transitional justice program should be, or what historical narrative is to be adopted.
One example is the Ministry of Culture’s proposed legislation to preserve designated sites of injustice. The objective of the bill would be to provide educational opportunities to keep alive awareness of human rights violations perpetrated during the White Terror period of authoritarian rule under the post-World War II Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.
These sites would be used to keep Taiwanese informed about their past and to achieve a form of healing.
This is not how the KMT sees it.
Suspicious that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government is seeking to use transitional justice as an excuse to politicize the past, KMT legislators on Oct. 30 proposed expanding the scope of the sites to include injustices committed during the Qing Dynasty and the Japanese colonial rule.
Is the scope defined as the White Terror era between the Japanese surrender in 1945 and the end of the White Terror in 1992 arbitrary and unfairly targeting the KMT?
On Tuesday last week DPP legislators and human rights groups told a news conference in Taipei that the KMT proposals were a cynical attempt to trivialize the party’s history of autocratic rule.
How far back does the government need to expand the scope before it stops being arbitrary? The answer to that would be that the White Terror period remains within living memory. Moreover, the KMT still exists. It forms the main opposition in the legislature, where it is doing its best to frustrate the government’s agenda. Its members are elected officials in every administrative region. KMT mayors and county commissioners are at the head of major cities, counties and special municipalities, including the nation’s capital.
By contrast, Japanese colonial rule ended in Taiwan in 1945. The Qing Dynasty ceded all control over Taiwan to Tokyo with the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. From that perspective, the designated scope does not appear so arbitrary anymore.
The term “living memory” can sound a little abstract. Take a look at the article “Daring to remember Taiwan’s past,” published today by Wei Hsin-chi (魏新奇), director of the WTJ Human Right, Culture and Education Association, about how letters from his father, Wei Ting-jao (魏廷朝), incarcerated in the Jingmei Military Detention Center for his role in the Kaohsiung Incident of 1979, brought back poignant memories of weekly family reunions before the father’s death in 1999. He writes: “I had forgotten that I remember it all.”
There is no recrimination in that article, no hate directed at the past KMT regime, only hope and forgiveness. That is the essence and the goal of transitional justice.
Then, there is the article “A question of loyalty to the nation” by former deputy secretary-general of the Lee Teng-hui Foundation Chu Meng-hsiang (朱孟庠), questioning how KMT Legislator Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲) can identify so explicitly with China when she is a 17th-generation Taiwanese with roots in Chiayi County, and who interprets her father and grandfather’s association with the Taiwanese Cultural Association, founded by Taiwanese democracy pioneer Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水), as representative of their anti-Japanese colonial ideology on the part of a “great China,” as opposed to being informed by a Taiwan nationalist loyalty.
This is the power of narrative and of the ideological manipulation of memory.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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