As Taiwanese readied to observe the 66th anniversary of the 228 Massacre last week, many were angered when it emerged that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), at the behest of a descendant of a perpetrator, had sent a letter to Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History asking it to uncover the “real facts” behind the incident.
For critics, Ma’s request was regarded as an attempt to rewrite, possibly with the intent of whitewashing the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) responsibility, a dark, albeit defining, chapter in the nation’s history.
While further studying of the causes, impact and future consequences of the massacre and the decades of the equally murderous White Terror that ensued, should be encouraged, it is shocking that, 66 years on, people in Taiwan, including Minister of Culture Lung Ying-tai (龍應台), can still question who bears ultimate responsibility — Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), governor Chen Yi (陳儀), unruly KMT soldiers, corrupt government officials or Taiwanese “thugs” — or how many people were slain, which is proof that the story is incomplete.
There are two main reasons why a full understanding of the massacre, or incident, depending on one’s point of view, remains elusive to this day.
First and foremost, while the KMT has apologized, and compensation has been made to some families of the victims, Taiwan has not gone through a systematic process of truth and reconciliation, as experienced in South Africa following the abolition of apartheid, nor has it undergone the kind of lustration that followed the fall of communism in the former Czech Republic. Consequently, healing remains incomplete.
A second and related factor is the lack of access to all the government documents from that period. Under prevailing regulations, case files can only be seen at the request of direct family members of victims of the massacre.
With several families unwilling to reopen the wounds of this painful era or, for various reasons, uninterested in doing so, the result is that several cases will never see the light of day, and thus preclude historians from piecing together a thorough picture of the events. Academics, historians and journalists with no family connection to victims cannot, on their own, see such files.
To be fair to the Ma administration, those regulations were not altered under previous KMT governments, or — and this is noteworthy — during the eight years of the Democratic Progressive Party administration. Part of the reason is that the case files are still treated as classified documents, the time-tried excuse used by public security and military agencies the world over to keep past misdeeds away from scrutiny.
One possible reason is that the actual role of the perpetrators and the severity of their acts may be much greater than what is commonly known, which in turn could result in calls for far greater compensation to the families of victims.
Ma can ask academics to take a fresh look at the events leading to and during the 228 Massacre, but as long as laws regulating access to the complete body of files are not changed, it will be impossible for the nation to really understand what happened and to fully comprehend the scope of human catastrophe. Making all the files public is the only way to uncover the truth.
Only then can it be determined, with a comfortable degree of certitude, whether individuals such as Peng Meng-chi (彭孟緝), also known as the “Kaohsiung butcher,” have been wronged by history, as his son now claims, or if they deserve such titles for ordering the murder of several Taiwanese.
Above all, the historical truth is what the nation needs to heal its wounds and rid itself of the source of a constant divide that prevents it from moving, of one heart, into the future.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS