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Editorial: Chen fumbles Taiwanese history

On Wednesday President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) issued an open letter to the armed forces marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the "war of resistance" against Japan. This egregiously offensive slap in the face by the president of Taiwan to the people of Taiwan cannot pass without condemnation.

The salient point about the 1937-45 war between China and Japan is that it was fought in a foreign country -- China -- and the Taiwanese, as colonial subjects of the Japanese Empire, were in fact on the other side. Their involvement in the war in China was limited due to there being no conscription in Taiwan until very late in the war. Most Taiwanese who served in the Japanese military did so in the Pacific theater, rather than China. As far as the Taiwanese are concerned, they won no victory in 1945.

That they were on the side of brutally militaristic Japan, albeit not voluntarily, is not something to be proud of. As a result, many Taiwanese have been willing to accept the rewriting of history by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime which occupied the country after 1945. In this revision, China fought Japan, Taiwan was part of China, and so Taiwan must have fought Japan too. This, of course, is nonsense. But unfortunately it is another example of the false consciousness and muddled sense of identification imbued in Taiwanese by half a century as the colonial subjects of the "Republic of China."

One of the problems with Taiwan's political changes over the last 15 years is that while it might have democratized, it has never successfully decolonized. Part of the problem is that few Taiwanese seem to understand their situation as a colonial one. They have been taught that the colonial yoke was lifted in 1945, and only the highly politically sophisticated can readily see that what happened in 1945 was that one colonial tutelage was replaced by another. Consequently the Democratic Progressive Party's status as a liberation movement has never been clearly defined, and is little understood even in the DPP itself -- except at the most rarefied levels of political discourse.

The result has been a pitiful lack of zeal to effect that change in consciousness that liberation movements usually seek to effect as quickly as possible. Out go the statues, the festivals, the historical and cultural icons of the colonial power, to be replaced with an alternative set belonging to the liberated domestic polity. In Taiwan this reshaping of the national consciousness has been patchy at best. Some good work has been done by the Ministry of Education, while the military, for example, has barely been dragged into the post-martial law age. Until last year the armed forces were still singing songs about "liberating the mainland."

The armed forces used to be the private army of the KMT and their "nationalization" is, DPP government officials say, a sensitive issue which must be done very gradually. Actually this is rubbish. All that was needed was a purge of officers who would not renounce political party membership and swear a new oath of allegiance to Taiwan. This would have weeded out the pro-China unificationists and the KMT party-army loyalists, and left Taiwan with an officer corps with far less questionable loyalties than it currently has.

But the military is is simply a mirror of the wider society; Taiwanese consciousness needs strengthening everywhere. Instead what we see is Chen doing exactly the opposite: buying into and reinforcing a view of history that is fundamentally detrimental to Taiwan.

After all, if the armed forces really beat the Japanese then they are China's soldiers, not Taiwan's -- in which case their loyalty has to be questioned. If they are really the armed forces of Taiwan, then the events of 60 years ago are irrelevant. Why can't Chen understand that?
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