Today is the 53rd anniversary of the 228 Incident -- 228 massacre some might call it, though the actual massacres came later -- when a ham-fisted attempt to confiscate smuggled cigarettes on Taipei's Yenping North Road sparked an islandwide rebellion against KMT rule, which was suppressed with extreme brutality by soldiers rushed over from the mainland. Though estimates of how many people were killed vary between 10,000 and 30,000, perhaps much more important than the numbers is the fact that the suppression encompassed the liquidation of a generation of Taiwanese intellectuals and community leaders.
Those who read this newspaper via our Website, and might never have dwelled in Taiwan, would have difficulty understanding the trauma caused by the events of spring 1947. They might especially find it difficult to appreciate the legacy of bitter ethnic hostility between descendents of early immigrants to Taiwan -- who now think of themselves as ethnic Taiwanese -- and the minority of "mainlander" carpetbaggers and, later, exiles who began arriving in 1945, that cleaves Taiwan society to this day. Yet they should. Because it has a direct impact on the state of cross-strait relations.
It's not that easy, admittedly. Of all the world's countries, Taiwan strikes outsiders as being among those with the least historical baggage. Yet this is due less to the absence of accurate accounts of its past than it is to the suppression of those accounts in the aftermath of the 228 Incident. The event simply has had no closure, partly because for 40 years mention of it was forbidden, on pain of torture and jail.
It wasn't the excesses of the crushing of the rebellion that made 228 such an incendiary subject, though these, of course, were the origin of much of the ethnic hostility that exists to this day. Rather, it was the reason for the uprising. Following Taiwan's reversion to Chinese control at the end of WWII, it took the KMT authorities just 18 months to convince the people of Taiwan that their new masters were vastly inferior, more corrupt, more lawless, and more arbitrary, than their Japanese predecessors. But the KMT was not about to be reminded of this.
Taiwan is now a democracy, the KMT has been localized, the mainlanders' political hegemony is a thing of the past and Taiwan has become one of the most open and pluralistic societies in Asia.
Tragically, however, Taiwanese are as much prisoners of their past as anyone else. The lack of closure -- still -- on 228 convinces most of them that nothing is to be got from China but violence and terror. The last time Taiwan was "reunited with the motherland" the consequences were terrible. The regime which now covets Taiwan doesn't even pretend to share the values of Taiwan society and has only one clear argument for reunification -- a gun to the head, as manifested in last week's now notorious white paper.
Days of remembrance usually have a moral point to them, something along the line of "never again." And many Taiwanese see the best way of avoiding repetition of the events of 1947 is to keep intolerant Chinese governments at arm's length. Thus, those who talk of reunification as if it were viable as an option, even a mere consideration -- Lien Chan (
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