By James Mitchell, Oliver Lin, Laurence Eyton, William Ide and Chiu Yu-tzu
STAFF REPORTERS
1. Retrocession of Taiwan: October 25, 1945
PHOTO: FILE
When Japan's surrender on Aug. 14 ended World War II, it effectively brought the curtain down on its empire. Soon afterward, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, authorized the KMT government in China to accept the Japanese surrender in Taiwan.
The weakness of the KMT's forces in China at the time, however, prevented this from happening immediately. It wasn't until Sept. 30, 1945, that the first official representative of Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣?階? government flew to Taipei. KMT troops did not land at Keelung until two weeks later, on Oct. 15.
When exactly "retrocession" took place is still a matter of debate. Technically speaking, the formal handover of power that occurred on Oct. 25 gave the KMT government the right to administer the island on behalf of the Allies, with a decision on its sovereignty to be decided at a future date.
PHOTO CREDIT: CHEN PING-HSUN
As far as the KMT was concerned, however, it was merely regaining sovereign territory from a foreign power after 50 years of occupation.
2. Lifting of martial law: 1987
By the end of the 1970s, with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran and Somoza's in Nicaragua, as well as the rapprochement between the US and China, the KMT was beginning to realize that rabid anti-communism was not enough to guarantee it future international support. The regime was isolated and widely despised for its poor human rights record and its lack of civil liberties. Symbolic of all this was martial law, in place for nearly four decades, which allowed the violation of constitutional rights with impunity.
PHOTO: FILE
The choice was simple: the KMT could go on jailing dissidents through the use of military kangaroo courts and remain internationally despised, or lift martial law, return to constitutional government and gain credit for doing so -- while learning to live with the freer, more pluralistic society that this would inevitably create. Already, the DPP had been formed, illegally, and had taken part in legislative elections. So when martial law was finally lifted there was no great outbreak of celebration, just a slowly dawning awareness that things could now be done which would have invited -- and received -- punishment in the past. It was perhaps another two years before most Taiwanese started to understand that their world had indeed changed, and that they could act accordingly.
3. 228 incident: February 28, 1947
Taiwan was, in 1947, a deeply troubled island. Chen Yi (3粉?, the KMT governor installed by Chiang kai-shek (蔣?階?, had imposed severe economic regulatory restrictions, part of a so-called "planned economy" that some claim was designed to strip Taiwan of its wealth and infrastructure and ship it wholesale back to China. Such conditions had made life not only miserable for many residents, but had engendered resentment toward their new masters.
PHOTO: RICK CHU
On the evening of Feb. 27, a policeman caught a woman selling contraband cigarettes on Yenping North Road (延?北路). He attempted to confiscate the goods, assaulting the woman in the process. An angry crowd gathered, and in what most historical accounts describe as the "panic" that followed, the policeman shot and killed four people as he tried to escape the mob.
Almost overnight, the event sparked a wave of civil disobedience and, in some places, open rebellion among the population. At first, the governor-general appeared to respond to some of the grievances put forward by citizens' committees, but at the same time he ordered troop reinforcements in from China.
When they arrived at Keelung Harbor, on March 8, 1947, soldiers simply shot their way into Taipei, launching a campaign of terror during which as many as 20,000 people were believed to have been killed.
The crackdown, which saw the majority of Taiwan's leading intellectuals and community leaders assassinated, was followed by the declaration of martial law. This began the period of White Terror, which resulted in the deaths of many thousands more "opponents of the state." The period of White Terror ended only with the beginning of democratization in the early 1980s.
4. Direct election of the president: March 23, 1996
One of the great ironies of the 1996 election -- which produced the "first democratically elected president in Chinese history, "as propagandists wrote at the time -- was that almost no one doubted that Lee Teng-hui would win. The contest, for many, was therefore to see whether the KMT leader, who had already served for eight years, could win a popular mandate with over half the vote. And that he did, with nearly 54 percent, allowing him to say, for the first time, that Taiwan could claim full status as a democracy.
The victory, however, came at a price. This came not from within, but from across the Taiwan Strait, where Chinese leaders, still angry from Lee's triumphant visit to his alma mater -- Cornell in the US -- the previous summer, took anti-Lee rhetoric to new heights. Accusing him of harboring "splittist" views, in the spring of 1996 they held a series of live missile tests in waters near Taiwan, sending missiles splashing down just 90 kilometers from its shores.
The exercises sent the US into a panic, committed as it was to defending Taiwan from such attacks, prompting it to send two aircraft carrier groups to the area as a warning to Beijing.
Lee's main opponent, of course, the DPP's Peng Ming-min (彭明敏), was himself a committed advocate of Taiwan independence. Analysts have said the military moves may have been a warning to Lee to make sure he stayed on the even keel of "eventual reunification," adding that ultimately, it helped him win the election by such a wide margin.
5. Withdrawal from the UN: 1971
By the mid-1960s, the battle for recognition as the "legitimate government" of China had already begun to tilt in Beijing's favor: France switched as early as 1964, with Canada and Italy following in 1970.
In the United Nations, however, "Free China" had been shown continued support, despite attempts by the PRC to get the question brought to the UN General Assembly.
By 1970, the situation had worsened, as China moved ahead of Taiwan in the see-saw battle, holding 68 allies to the ROC's 53.
In October 1971, that changed, when the US, which had just a year earlier opened the doors to improved relations with China, dropped its usual resolution objecting to the PRC's entry into the world body.
Rather than wait to be removed, as all believed was inevitable, the ROC withdrew from the UN in protest against China's admittance.
The diplomatic gap continued to widen, reaching 85-39 in 1973 and hitting a low of 111-23 in 1977.
6. KMT's retreat to Taiwan: December 8, 1949
Throughout the year, as the KMT's military efforts against Mao's communists collapsed in China, KMT troops and officials had been arriving in Taiwan. Not all of them wanted to come. Sometimes it was a question of the KMT moving their disgruntled soldiers to Taiwan if only to stop them going over to the communists. Nor were the Taiwanese happy to have them there. Some wanted independence, some preferred the communists, the rest just wanted good government. According to the British consul, "There is hardly one [person] who would wish the continuation of the present regime. "The impact of some two million mostly penniless refugees on an island with a native population of six million caused huge economic and social dislocations. Both the exiles' high-handed behavior and the ruthless crackdown on any kind of dissent created scars that have yet to heal. Nobody expected this last-ditch stand of the KMT to last more than a few months after Washington declared it had no interest in defending the KMT on Taiwan. The regime was, ironically, saved by North Korea's invasion of the South, which led to Washington changing its mind.
7. US de-recognizes Taiwan: January 1, 1979
When the US announced in late 1978 that it would cut its formal relations with Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with China, it came as something of a shock to officials here.
The late President Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) was awoken at 2am on Dec. 16, 1978, to be informed by the US ambassador of the news: that US President Jimmy Carter was about to announce his decision to sever ties with Taiwan.
A state of emergency was imposed. Legislative and National Assembly elections were also suspended, arguably one of the factors leading to the Kaohsiung Incident on Dec. 10, 1979.
On April 10, 1979, Carter signed into law the Taiwan Relations Act, which served as the basis for unofficial relations in the absence of formal ties. The law has been hailed by proponents as effectively protecting Taiwan from China. "The Taiwan Relations Act has proved to be a surprisingly effective guide for US policy. Over the past 20 years, the TRA has allowed the United States to preserve peace, promote freedom and maintain flexibility in balancing its relations and interests with governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, "said Stephen Yates, a senior policy analyst at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation.
8. Kaohsiung incident: December 10, 1979
The Incident, which began as a march by opposition activists to commemorate Human Rights Day, has been labelled as the seminal event in Taiwan's democratization. Certainly, if one considers that many of the current senior line-up in the DPP -- Huang Hsin-chieh (黃信?? who died late last month), Lin I-hsiung (林義雄), Chang Chun-hung (張俊宏), Yao Chia-wen (姚1??, Shi Ming-teh (施明德), and others -- were jailed for their involvement, it is easy to draw a line of development among opposition ranks that began that night. Significantly, the party's current presidential candidate, Chen Shui-bian (3?糮?, was among the lawyers that defended the group, which included his vice-presidential running mate, Annette Lu (呂秀3s).
The march, in central Kaohsiung, was organized by members of the tang wai (黨外) magazine, Formosa (美麗島), which had begun publication just four months earlier. During the event, however, agitators -- widely believed to be in the employ of the KMT -- began attacking police, resulting in a bloody battle with tear gas-wielding police that left dozens of people injured. Both the government and mainstream media blamed the violence on the Formosa group, pointing to their attempts to "destabilize" the government.
Most of the senior figures behind the Formosa magazine, who became known as the "Kaohsiung Eight," were quickly rounded up and tried for attempted sedition by a military court to between 10 years and life in prison. All, however, had been freed by 1990.
9. Nine-year compulsory education: 1968
In 1968, compulsory education was extended to nine years, to graduation from junior high school after six years of elementary schooling. The move lifted enrollment rates at the junior high level from 57.6 percent of all primary school pupils in 1967, to more than 99 percent within 10 years of its implementation.
It has also unquestionably improved public education and laid a solid foundation for social changes as Taiwan became a civil society.
Before 1968, primary school graduates had to take entrance exams to seek further education. The extension to nine years of compulsory education thus spared later graduates from fierce competition for "higher education."
The hasty expansion of junior high schools was, however, not without problems.
As part of the push for junior high schools to improve student performance in entrance exams for senior high schools, students were generally divided into "good classes" and "bad classes" by school authorities. In so-called "good" classes, students were crammed with material for entrance exams at the expense of the normal learning process. Students in "bad classes," meanwhile, were all but abandoned. Education authorities later banned such divisions, but other problems still linger.
10. Hsinchu Kuantoushan earthquake: April 21, 1935
The deadliest earthquake of the century, registering 7.1 on the Richter scale, hit Taiwan on April 21, 1935, during Japan's occupation of the island.
People in the northern part of the island felt the quake, while those in southern Taiwan were reportedly spared.
The death toll, according to historical accounts, reached 3,279, while another 2,053 were injured. A total of 54,688 buildings were said to have collapsed or sustained damage.
The tremor was an outburst of seismic energy accumulated between the Tuntzuchiao Fault (??l腳斷層) and the Shitan Fault (獅潭斷層), near Mt. Kuantou, then part of Hsinchu County.
According to records kept by the Central Weather Bureau, unusual natural phenomena seen during the quake included large-scale landslides, a buckling of the earth's surface and underground movement of sand that occasionally gushed to the surface.
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