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Taiwan's 228 Incident and the Politics of Placing Blame

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Taiwan's 228 Incident and the Politics of Placing Blame Taiwan’s 228 Incident and the Politics of Placing Blame | 143 Craig A. Smith, University of British Columbia On February 28, 1947, an uprising began and was followed by the massacre of thousands of ethnic Taiwanese. Although the memory of this massacre was suppressed by forty years of martial law, it has recently become an important socio-political symbol in modern Taiwan. The construction of the symbolic mythology of the 228 Incident has remade the massacre as an important historical event and a divisive tool in the political and ethnic turmoil of Taiwan. This paper examines the event of the 228 Incident and determines how the incident has been mythologized in modern political discourses due to its recently acquired symbolic status in Taiwan’s history. The paper pays particular attention to interpretations and reactions of Taiwan’s two major political parties. February 28, 2007 marked the sixtieth anniversary of the 228 Incident,1 an uprising on Taiwan which was brutally suppressed with the massacre of thousands, and perhaps tens of thousands, of civilians by Kuomintang2 (KMT國民黨) troops. The academic 1 In academic writing the 228 Incident (read as two-two-eight) is also often known as the February 28 Incident or the Formosa Uprising. I choose to use the 228 Incident as this English name has become more popular in recent years and is a direct translation of the Chinese name Er er ba Shijian 二二八事件. 2 The Romanization of Chinese characters is always a frustrating and complicated issue. I have primarily adhered to the popular pinyin system with some important exceptions. The names of writers and artists from Taiwan are written in the Wade-Giles system, which is still commonly used for publications of works from Taiwan. For the names of people and places that are already established in Past Imperfect 14 (2008) | © | ISSN 1711-053X | eISSN 1718-4487 world commemorated the event with the hosting of conferences on the subject, most of which were in Taiwan, but some were even held as far away as Sweden, where a conference was hosted by London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. In Taiwan, where the day has been a national holiday since 1996, numerous commemorative events were held across the island, 144 | most of them by the Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨 DPP).3 The DPP has taken possession of “Peace Memorial Day” (和平紀念日) as a day to remember the violence caused by the KMT. The KMT has no choice but to be on the defensive at such commemorations. In 2007, responsibility was the foremost topic with the DPP pinning the responsibility on late dictator Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 and pulling down his statues across the island. The KMT has refused this perspective, but will likely be unable to stop the continued denouncements of Chiang, which even led to the Executive Yuan’s renaming of Taiwan’s most well-known monument, Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂), as Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall (台灣民主紀念館) in 2007.4 The quest to determine responsibility remains an important and English-language publications, I have tried to adhere to their preferred or most popular spellings. The initial occurrence of all Chinese names and terms is followed by the original Chinese characters in traditional script. 3 Politics in Taiwan, which is formally called the Republic of China, are dominated by two political parties: The Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party. The KMT led Taiwan from the time of its retrocession to China in 1945 until they lost the second direct presidential election in 2000. They had won the first election in 1996. The DPP led Taiwan through two terms from 2000 to 2008. On March 22, 2008, Ma Ying-jeou, chairman of the KMT, won the fourth presidential election, regaining the KMT’s position as the party in power. 4 However, before the 2008 election Ma Ying-jeou promised to restore its former name if elected. Ma became president in May of 2008, although at the time of writing he had not yet taken steps to do so. Past Imperfect 14 (2008) | © | ISSN 1711-053X | eISSN 1718-4487 controversial debate with numerous opposing perspectives on an event that took place more than sixty years ago. This paper considers the events and circumstances surrounding the 228 Incident and determines how the incident has been mythologized by later generations, especially through Taiwan’s politics since the 1980s, due to its symbolic status in the history of the so-called Republic of China on Taiwan. The | 145 construction of the symbolic mythology of the 228 Incident has made the uprising an important historical event and a divisive tool in the political and ethnic turmoil of contemporary Taiwan. By examining the incident as it is seen, first by historians, then by politicians, I will show how the mythologization process has centred, in this arena, on the charging of responsibility. As Jeffrey C. Alexander states, “[I]n creating a compelling trauma narrative, it is critical to establish the identity of the perpetrator, the ‘antagonist.’”5 Since the end of martial law in 1987, the DPP has managed to successfully tie itself to the remembrance of the 228 Incident, a critical move in its political aspirations. An effective trauma narrative with Chiang Kai-shek as its antagonist has been constructed. During this same time period, the KMT have been forced to evolve considerably in order to ensure that the implications of such a narrative no longer have the efficacy they once held in the political arena. The importance of the 228 Incident cannot be underestimated by politicians in Taiwan. In the divisive politics of the island, the symbolism of a massacre perpetrated by mainlanders against Taiwanese is of crucial importance. And the 5 Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” in Jeffrey C. Alexander, et al, (Eds), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15. Past Imperfect 14 (2008) | © | ISSN 1711-053X | eISSN 1718-4487 use of this massacre in Taiwanese politics and nationalism as a sacred and sensitive event that binds Taiwanese together and divides them from the mainlanders makes the incident an important topic for historians. It is strange then to see that it has been ignored by many. In Immanuel Hsü’s lengthy The Rise of Modern China, it is treated in a single paragraph.6 The same pithy 146 | coverage of the Incident is evident in Jonathan Spence’s The Search for Modern China.7 However, both these books have a chapter on Taiwan, focusing instead on the economic “miracle” of modern Taiwan. In John F. Copper’s widely-read political science text, Taiwan: Nation-State or Province?, one would imagine the incident would find more importance. However, it is only briefly mentioned on three pages and incorrectly states that the incident that triggered the uprising was “when plainclothes police officers killed a Taiwanese woman who had been selling black-market cigarettes.”8 However, it was bystander Chen Wenxi (陳文溪), not cigarette seller Lin Jiangmai (林江邁) who was killed. It seems that these eminent authors of Taiwan’s past have not kept up with the 228 Incident’s importance in the present. Therefore, it is necessary to first consider a brief account of the events that occurred in 1947. The ‘Incident’ 6 Immanuel C.Y Hsü, The Rise of Modern China (Sixth Edition) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 739. 7 Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999), 485. 8 John F. Copper, Taiwan: Nation-State of Province (Fourth Edition), (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003), 44 - 46. Past Imperfect 14 (2008) | © | ISSN 1711-053X | eISSN 1718-4487 Since the establishment of Nationalist rule on October 25th, 1945, the economic and social situation in Taiwan had worsened considerably. Despite early efforts by the Kuomintang to prepare for the retrocession of Taiwan,9 the Nationalists had neither the experience, nor the personnel resources to govern Taiwan with the same level of efficiency and stability managed by the Japanese 10 government. Furthermore, the deterioration of the situation on | 147 the mainland as the civil war deepened consumed all the attention of top KMT officials, and drained resources from Taiwan. The incident that triggered the riots is a relatively minor, but now very famous event. On the evening of Thursday February 27, 1947, an old woman was found selling illegal cigarettes by officers of the Monopoly Bureau outside the Tianma Tea Store on Taiping Street (now Yanping Street) in Taipei City. As they attempted to arrest the woman, a crowd gathered. In the confusion that followed, an officer shot and killed one of the people. Although the officers were able to escape from the scene, the enraged crowd marched to the local police office to demand the execution of the shooter.11 Word of the incident spread quickly and deliberately. The protesters demanded that newspapers publish the event, even 9 The Kuomintang began serious preparations for the rule of Taiwan after the Cairo Declaration of 1943. Lai, Myers, Wou, A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 56- 57. As it is still the finest English-language text on the 228 Incident, I have cited A Tragic Beginning numerous times. However, it should be noted that this book, like any on the incident, is often accused of being biased. Many have accused it of having a bias in favor of the KMT. 10 The size of the Early ROC bureaucracy on Taiwan was only half that of Japan’s of two years earlier. The military and police forces on Taiwan were only 6.4 percent of what Japan had stationed on Taiwan.
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