During his speech to commemorate the 228 Incident, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) compared it to the “Jasmine Revolutions” now underway in North Africa and the Middle East, saying that both events were about the fight for democracy and freedom. He also said that Ong Thiam-teng , who at the time was president of the Taipei Tea Merchants’ Association and a member of the Provincial Council and was killed in the wake of the incident, was an idealistic intellectual. In short, Ma said that the 228 Incident was not a conflict between ethnic groups and that it had nothing to do with the subsequent Taiwanese independence movement. Rather, he described it as an inevitable movement of popular resistance against injustice.
In the past, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) denigrated the 228 Incident as having been started by “criminals and Japanese instigators” or being a “revolt by Taiwanese independence rebels.” This formulation meant to justify the KMT’s suppression of the uprising and deny its responsibility. While this is more than enough to make one angry, the way Ma, in his capacity as president and KMT chairman, is now trying to paint a distorted picture of the 228 Incident is equally disconcerting.
Earlier this year, he paid his respects at the mausoleum of former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) in Touliao (頭寮), Taoyuan County. Then he went to Taichung for the opening of a memorial hall dedicated to General Sun Li-jen (孫立人), where he expressed great sadness and sympathy for Sun and other generals who he said had been “unjustly accused.” This is an example the KMT’s version of transitional justice — pandering to both sides.
Ong was a key figure in the 228 Settlement Committee (二 二 八事件處理委員會), and his place in history is closely linked to the “32 Demands” drawn up by the committee. Ma has publicly praised the work of the late Academia Sinica research fellow Hwang Chang-chien (黃彰健), who highlighted the first of the 32 demands, which was for government forces to hand over their weapons, saying that this amounted to a demand for Taiwan independence.
In comparison, Ma’s recent comments are much more evenhanded. The 228 Settlement Committee wanted troops around Taiwan to temporarily disarm and hand over their weapons to Settlement Committee branch offices and the gendarmerie, so as to prevent further bloodshed. Given the fact that soldiers and police around Taiwan had been shooting citizens at will, this demand was surely quite reasonable. Indeed, the Settlement Committee’s 32 demands had little or nothing to do with Taiwan independence. Nevertheless, on March 2, 1947, governor-general Chen Yi (陳儀) flatly rejected the 32 demands, using them as evidence of criminal activity by those seized in the wave of arrests that followed.
On March 10, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cited the “improper” demands of the 228 Settlement Committee as the main reason for dispatching troops to Taiwan. This is why Wu Ko-tai (吳克泰), an eyewitness to the 228 Incident, said: “The measures taken to deal with the incident were played out by Chiang Kai-shek and Chen Yi acting in concert ... Just like Chen, Chiang can hardly escape culpability for the bloody suppression that followed.”
If Ma sincerely believes that Ong was unjustly accused, then his view runs contrary to that of Chiang and Chen. In that case, he should do his utmost to help Ong’s family find out what happened to him and agree with those who accuse Chiang and Chen as being responsible for the 288 Incident. He should withdraw his support for Hwang’s historical interpretation and stop insisting on the preservation of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall (中正紀念堂) in its present form. Only then will Ma achieve logical consistency and demonstrate that his apologies are sincere.
The point that needs stressing is that nobody was held accountable for the massacre. On the contrary, Peng Meng-chi (彭孟緝), then head of the Provincial Garrison Command, was given an important position and allowed to impose White Terror throughout the 1950s. These events are what fueled the Taiwanese independence movement as it came to the fore in later years. As to Ma, one cannot but admire the man for the happy and amiable face he presents while trying to erase historical facts and deny the KMT’s responsibility, and the way he still manages to fool people into voting for him and his party.
Chen Yi-shen is an associate research fellow in the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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