Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) may have been rivals, but they shared fundamental values. Even in death, both men occupy prime real estate in their capitals, where they continue to overlook and poison the nations they ruled from a splendid memorial hall.
In 2007, the name of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was changed to National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall — a symbol of democracy and rejection of dictatorship.
Since his election last year, however, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has ignored public opinion and — true to style — reinstalled the plaque with the memorial’s original name.
Ma said Chiang’s contributions and mistakes should be defined by historians, but by restoring the plaque he is contradicting himself: This decision was made by a government dominated by Ma and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), not historians.
If Ma respects history and historians, he might look at how a Western historian outside the pan-blue/pan-green divide describes Chiang’s status.
Rudolph Rummel, a 77-year-old professor emeritus of political science at the University of Hawaii, is an expert in this field. He has published 24 books about dictators and mass death and created the term “democide,” which refers to murder by government. In his book Death by Government, he listed the 10 worst dictators of the 20th century — and Chiang was among them.
Rummel’s studies are highly respected and he has received many awards, including a lifetime achievement award six years ago from the American Political Science Association. According to The Associated Press, he has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times.
This man’s research and his definition of Chiang can therefore serve as an authoritative judgment.
Even if we view Chiang from a layman’s perspective, we see that in the 50 years from obtaining power as commander-in-chief of the Northern Expeditionary Army in 1926 to his death in 1975, his government held no democratic elections and his word was law. What is this, if not a dictatorship?
Putting aside Chiang’s responsibility for the 228 Incident, he and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) oversaw 38 years of martial law in Taiwan. According to a report by the Ministry of Justice when Ma was minister, “military courts handled 29,007 political cases with approximately 140,000 victims” under the two Chiangs. In 1960 alone, the government listed 126,875 people as “missing” and withdrew their household registration, showing just how many people were executed publicly or in secret. If Chiang, who ruled the nation through violence and political prisons, was not a dictator, then who is?
Just like any other dictator, Chiang loved erecting statues of himself. According to media reports, there were at least 45,000 such statues around Taiwan, making it the country with the highest density of statues of a national leader in the world. In addition, his dozens of villas and items that he used are now treated as historical monuments and relics — even one of his handkerchiefs is on exhibit at the memorial hall.
When the government proposed that the name of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall be restored, the Washington Post, The Associated Press and other media outlets called Chiang a “dictator” and pointed out the cruelty of his rule. By reinstalling the plaque, the government is publicly challenging democratic values while boosting the name of a tyrant.
Ma was elected KMT chairman on Sunday. With both party and government in his hands, he is leaning toward totalitarian China while praising Chiang and his son. This is a bad omen for Taiwan.
Cao Changqing is a freelance journalist based in the US.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Shen You-chung (沈有忠) on Thursday last week urged democratic nations to boycott China’s military parade on Wednesday next week. The parade, a grand display of Beijing’s military hardware, is meant to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. While China has invited world leaders to attend, many have declined. A Kyodo News report on Sunday said that Japan has asked European and Asian leaders who have yet to respond to the invitation to refrain from attending. Tokyo is seeking to prevent Beijing from spreading its distorted interpretation of wartime history, the report
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase