Considering the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) past position that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) initiated the Civil War and that advocating Taiwanese independence was tantamount to insurgency, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) statement that the 228 Incident was the result of a public reaction to official oppression, thus placing the fault with the government, would seem to be a step forward. Is there any reason to oppose this development?
Given the complex history of the 228 Incident, there are many aspects that cannot be explained simply by saying that it was a public reaction to official oppression. The misgovernment more than a year after the end of World War II ignited the violence that took place at the outset of the Incident, which is more in line with Ma’s position, but one also has to consider the intermediate and later stages of the incident.
The most tragic part of the incident is the deaths and miscarriages of justice that resulted from the disorganized counterattacks by the party, the government and the army, the random shooting — in particular from March 8, 1947, by the military police that arrived from China’s Fujian Province and the 21st division of the Nationalist army — and the two or three months of appeasement, mop-up actions and score-settling that began on March 21.
That is why describing the incident as a matter of a public reaction to official oppression is tantamount to an excuse and saying that the suppression was the result of rioting. It also completely avoids the issue of whether the KMT regime engaged in revenge-driven slaughter.
The 228 Incident was both a clash between ethnic groups and a clash between the government and the public. Although the opposition between Mainlanders and ethnic Taiwanese was the result of a set of very specific historic conditions, it must not be ignored just because we do not want to deal with it. This is yet another reason why saying it was a public reaction to official oppression does not suffice as an explanation.
More than five years ago, the Taiwan 228 Care Association filed a lawsuit against the KMT and its legal representative, President Ma Ying-jeou, demanding that the party offer a public apology in specific media outlets, donate NT$2 billion (US$63.79 million) to finance the establishment and operation of a memorial hall, and hand over all the party’s relevant files and documents to the National Development Council’s National Archives Administration for safekeeping and publication.
The KMT and Ma’s appointed legal representatives were then-Taipei City councilor Lai Su-ju (賴素如) and Hung Wen-jun (洪文浚). The main point of their defense was that “if the Republic of China (ROC) government indeed is guilty of the infringements that the plaintiffs claim it is [note: the defendant denies that there is any truth to the plaintiffs’ accusation of infringements], it would at most be a question of whether the ROC regime infringed on the rights of the plaintiffs, which cannot be used to claim that the defendant has carried out.”
Incredibly, in its ruling confirming the not guilty verdict in the two previous instances, the Supreme Court perpetuated the preposterous idea that “the 228 suppression was a matter of the government carrying out its public duties, and said it had nothing to do with the KMT.”
The Constitution took effect on Dec. 25, 1947, and the 228 Incident occurred during the party-state period. Do the judges not have even the most basic knowledge of history? I cannot help but think that by saying that the 228 Incident was a matter of a public reaction to official oppression, Ma has succeeded in absolving the KMT of responsibility.
Chen Yi-shen is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.
Translated by Perry Svensson
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
In an op-ed published in Foreign Affairs on Tuesday, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) said that Taiwan should not have to choose between aligning with Beijing or Washington, and advocated for cooperation with Beijing under the so-called “1992 consensus” as a form of “strategic ambiguity.” However, Cheng has either misunderstood the geopolitical reality and chosen appeasement, or is trying to fool an international audience with her doublespeak; nonetheless, it risks sending the wrong message to Taiwan’s democratic allies and partners. Cheng stressed that “Taiwan does not have to choose,” as while Beijing and Washington compete, Taiwan is strongest when
RSS