Page 1 of 2 Taiwan: The struggle to spin history
By Jonathan Adams
TAIPEI - When former Kuomintang (KMT) chairman Ma Ying-jeou visited Taipei's
228 Memorial Museum on Tuesday to meet with relatives of victims of a 1947
massacre, not everyone gave him a warm reception. Ma met with the relatives in
a bid to heal wounds left over from the tragedy, in which KMT troops brutally
put down a local uprising against one and a half years of the party's bumbling
rule of Taiwan.
For at least one relative, Ma's visit was just another insincere stunt. "Stop
making political shows, Ma Ying-jeou!" shouted an
irate Hsiao Chin-wen, as Ma chatted quietly with the group over tea. "Don't
politicize the event anymore!"
On the 60th anniversary of the 2/28 Incident, such criticisms were more heated
than ever - and Ma wasn't the only target. President Chen Shui-bian's lame-duck
government also came under fire, for using the date to score political points
and foment anti-KMT sentiment as the 2008 presidential campaign gets under way.
So it goes on the bitterly divided island: each side uses the 2/28 Incident to
push its own political agenda, while accusing the other of politicizing the
date. The result is that for many increasingly cynical Taiwanese, the
anniversary is just another battleground in a long political war - and an
excuse for politicians to try to stir up conflict where none exists.
The 2/28 Incident "has nothing to do with us, it's something the older
generation cares about", said Jamie Huang, a 21-year-old student at National
Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. "There's no problem between waishengren
[mainlanders who came to Taiwan with the KMT in the 1940s] and benshengren
[local Taiwanese who predate that wave of immigration]. But politicians use
2/28 because they want there to be a problem."
The incident may be ancient history for youth like Huang, and politicians like
Chen and Ma weren't even born when it occurred, but for elderly Taiwanese,
including former president Lee Teng-hui, it's still very much a living memory.
It began when KMT officials beat a woman selling black-market cigarettes in
downtown Taipei on February 27, 1947, and then shot dead an angry onlooker.
That sparked days of anti-KMT riots that spread islandwide. The KMT began
negotiations with local Taiwanese to end the standoff, but between March 6 and
18, KMT forces garrisoned in the south and reinforcements from the mainland
that landed in the north went on a killing spree.
They slaughtered civilians at random to terrorize the Taiwanese into
submission, and carried out a targeted campaign to wipe out the Taiwanese elite
- local leaders and intellectuals - who represented the biggest threat to KMT
rule. To this date the numbers killed are uncertain, but historians estimate
30,000.
Those facts are not generally disputed. But given Taiwan's polarization, the
raw politicking over 2/28 is perhaps inevitable. For Chen's Democratic
Progressive Party (DPP), appeals to Taiwan-first patriotism and anti-KMT hatred
are time-honored ways to shore up support for the party's "deep green" base.
For such people, 2/28 represents the original sin of a repressive,
authoritarian KMT regime, whose still-visible legacy remains to be completely
dismantled.
The most prominent icon of that regime: late president Chiang Kai-shek, whose
portrait once hung in every classroom - where speaking the Taiwanese dialect
was long forbidden - as part of a campaign to indoctrinate Taiwanese in the
KMT's Chinese nationalism.
Since taking power in 2000, Chen's government, whose grander ambitions have
been blocked by the opposition-controlled legislature, has been quietly
removing Chiang's image from classrooms, museums and military bases. (At
Huang's high school in Taichung, a prominent Chiang statue vanished during one
winter vacation about five years ago without a word from school officials.)
Now there's a bigger target: Taipei's landmark Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall,
which the government wants to transform into a democracy memorial hall. And
this year, Chen stressed that Chiang was ultimately to blame for the tragedy,
and demanded that the KMT apologize for the atrocities of the entire
martial-law era, which lasted until 1987.
Whether such moves represent appeals for "transitional justice" in a young
democracy or mere KMT-bashing depends, of course, on your politics. Chiang
Kai-shek's grandson John Chiang, now a KMT legislator, is incensed at recent
moves to revise his grandfather's place in history, from the "savior of the
people" to a dictator with blood on his hands.
Chiang said he may sue the president and the DPP chairman for defamation. Ma,
who is still the KMT's best shot at taking back the presidency next year
despite being charged with corruption, has argued that the 2/28 Incident was
not primarily an ethnic conflict, but rather an uprising against the government
that was mishandled by local KMT officials.
That's seen by some as an attempt to manipulate history to play down the KMT's
guilt and shore up support from his own "deep
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