China took a more public approach while Taiwan's Tsai Ing-wen made her first visit to the memorial as prez
A shuttered tailor’s shop, a nondescript bank, a former radio station. Often lost in the busy hum of today’s Taipei, this is the time of the year when these buildings reverberate with violent echoes from 70 years ago, when Taiwan’s modern identity was born.
The “2/28 Incident,” as it has come to be known, was an uprising that flared on February 28, 1947. It soon spread to other parts of the island, and was crushed in the massacre of up to 28,000 Taiwanese by the troops of Chiang Kai-shek, a Nationalist leader of China. The revolt was followed by four decades of martial law and divisions between Taiwanese whose roots in the island predated the Nationalists’ arrival in 1945 and the Chinese mainlanders who came after.
Yet it was the eventual willingness to confront these events that enabled Taiwan’s people to begin to heal those divisions and achieve the voice in their government that the protesters demanded seven decades ago.
“In recent years, the quest to redress February 28 has been a very important development,” said Su Ching-hsuan, executive secretary of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation. “It’s had a major influence on Taiwan’s democracy movement.”
And that quest continues. Last week, a committee of scholars released six new volumes of files related to the uprising, which they said reinforced the conclusion that ultimate responsibility for the massacre lay with Chiang.
The February 28 episode actually began a day before, outside the Pegasus Teahouse in Dadaocheng, old Taipei’s commercial district. A widow selling cigarettes illegally was confronted by inspectors and police. After an inspector struck her head with his pistol, enraged passers-by surrounded the officers, one of whom shot and killed a bystander before the officers escaped into police protection.
Unable to pressure authorities into giving up the officer that night, hundreds of protesters gathered the next morning to march from Dadaocheng to the office of Taiwan’s governor, Chen Yi, to demand justice.
Taiwanese anger at the Nationalists had been building for months. Nationalist soldiers were originally greeted as liberators by Taiwanese, who had lived under Japanese colonial rule for 50 years. For a fleeting moment, there was optimism that Taiwan would enjoy greater self-determination. They wouldn’t.
“When the Chinese arrived, people thought their situation would improve, because many Taiwanese were of Chinese descent, but things became even worse,” said Hsieh Tsai-Ming, who has been leading tours at the Taipei 228 Memorial Hall since it opened on February 28, 1997.
Chen had taken a ham-handed approach to ruling the Taiwanese, Hsieh said. By mid-1946, he had shut down all Japanese-language publications and had made Mandarin the official language of the local government, essentially shutting out many Taipei residents. Locals were aghast at the unruly behaviour of Nationalist troops, while Nationalist officials seized public and private property.
Besides that, residents simmered under corruption, mismanagement and the shifting of resources to the Chinese mainland, where the Nationalists were fighting Mao Zedong’s Communists. The marchers of February 28 headed south from Dadaocheng toward the north gate of the old city wall, their numbers steadily multiplying.
Chou Ching, a local journalist, recorded the moment he arrived at the north gate. “I saw a giant banner coming my way,” he wrote in his 1993 book, “Love and Hate: Feb. 28.”
“Written on it were eight big characters reading, ‘Severely punish the killer — a life for a life.’ A leather drum 2.5 chi (about 3 feet) across, following behind the banner, rattled eardrums … behind the drum followed a trail of innumerable people joining the petition procession. There were men and women, elderly and children, but it was primarily youth.”
The march took a violent turn after arriving at a Taiwan Monopoly Bureau office, Chung
Lee-ho, a novelist, wrote in his diaries, also published in 1993. “Regardless of what it was, the crowd grabbed and carried everything they could from the Monopoly Bureau and burned it, even cars, bicycles and rickshaws,” Chung wrote.
Shortly after the unarmed crowd reached the governor’s office, soldiers opened fire, killing several protesters and wounding dozens. A group fled and took over the provincial radio station, calling for an uprising against the Nationalists, an end to corruption, and a greater say in the island’s economy.
Revolts broke out in all major cities. Taiwanese people were soon in charge, managing government offices and keeping order in the streets. Chen played along, biding his time until military reinforcements arrived from the Chinese mainland. Then the killing began. Streets were cleared by soldiers in jeeps with machine guns, who then rounded up Communists and anyone else considered suspect. Most were tortured and killed.
Although most victims were not Communists, a Communist presence in Taiwan was setting up an underground resistance. One party member, Xie Xuehong, had an important role in the uprising, an angle that China’s Communist government has used over the years to lay a claim of solidarity with the people of Taiwan, which it considers the last Chinese province yet to be reclaimed from the vanquished Nationalists.
Ulterior motives
China has long commemorated February 28, usually quietly. This year, for the 70th anniversary, it took a more public approach, organising a symposium in Beijing on February 28 “is a part of the Chinese people’s liberation struggle,” said An Fengshan, a spokesman for China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, at a news conference February 22. He added, “For a long time, this incident has been used by certain Taiwan independence forces for ulterior motives.”
During the martial law years, discussion of the February 28 uprising was banned. After martial law was lifted in 1987, some people found the confidence to speak up, with the tacit encouragement of President Lee Teng-hui, the first leader of modern Taiwan who was born there. In 1995, Lee became the first senior official to mention February 28 publicly, opening the floodgates for discussion.
Today, a small plaque where the Pegasus Teahouse once stood marks the location, most recently occupied by a tailor’s shop. The Monopoly Bureau office is today a bank. And the former radio station houses the Taipei 228 Memorial. In 2009, Ma Ying-jeou became the first president of Taiwan to visit the memorial to commemorate February 28, which he did in each of his eight years in office. On Tuesday last, Tsai Ing-wen made her first visit as president.
Hsiao Ming-Chih, a curator at the 228 memorial, said Ma’s visits were an acknowledgment of the Nationalists’ “original sin.” Seventy years on, as one of Asia’s freest democracies, Taiwan has made significant progress in eliminating the old Chinese-Taiwanese divisions. Most young people claim a “Taiwanese” identity, regardless of when their ancestors arrived. But for some, closure may never come.
Ma’s commemoration of the event, overseeing reparations to victims’ families and other displays of concern “definitely had an impact,” Hsiao said. “But whether relatives, or people of different political stripes, find that acceptable, that’s another matter.”
International New York Times
