These incidents were illegal, and the only reason no one stood up and said as much was that they didn't dare. The two Chiangs were indeed dictators, and there is no comparison between them and the Kangxi emperor: The reason we can say this is precisely because they went against the laws and ethical standards of their own time, which remain the same today. This is still true regardless of the fact that they might not have been as cruel as the Kangxi emperor had been.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has done a very good job of categorizing different periods, and we have become used to referring to the recent past in terms of the end of martial law, the first free elections, and the transition of power from the KMT to the DPP when President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) was made head of state, to such an extent that these periods are seen as distinct from each other.
This kind of distinction may well make sense when talking about the Russian revolution or the establishment of the People's Republic of China, but in Taiwan's case, democratization has merely been a process of increasing political freedoms and a change in governing parties.
We may well think our society is very different from the one we had during the martial law period, but in fact 99 percent of the laws we have now were made prior to democratization: Social relations, our value system, our view of history and the distribution of money and power have remained the same.
If there is a difference, it is that we now have the courage to speak up, and I hope that we can use the standards of that era (also the current era's) to seek justice for any illegal behavior that happened at the time. This is a basic requirement. We cannot, we should not, use the party-state as an excuse to obstruct this.
Liang Wen-chieh is a former deputy director of the DPP's policy coordination committee and a doctoral candidate in the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Translated by Daniel Cheng and Paul Cooper
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