It has been almost 40 years since Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) died, and yet he remains a contentious figure capable of arousing deep loyalty and gut-wrenching antipathy on an island he arrived on as a refugee, albeit a conquering one.
The government Chiang transplanted has remained in the hands of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) except for a brief eight-year intermission, although the number of people who see themselves as “Taiwanese” as opposed to “Chinese,” as well as those who support Taiwanese independence, hit historic highs at the beginning of this year, according to a survey conducted by National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center. The poll found that 60.6 percent of respondents regard themselves as Taiwanese, compared with the 17.6 percent who did so in 1992. Only 3.5 percent said they consider themselves to be Chinese, down from 26.2 percent in 1994, while a record-low 32.5 percent identified themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese.
So why is there still such a fuss about removing statues and busts of Chiang from schools and parks around the nation? Some KMT councilors in Tainan ridiculously tried to link the uprooting of such statues from 14 junior-high and elementary schools in the municipality last weekend to the Islamic State fighters’ destruction of ancient Assyrian statues and artifacts at a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and called Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) a “terrorist.”
These councilors raised the KMT’s common complaint against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), saying that Lai’s decision to relocate the statues to the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Garden in Taoyuan’s Dasi District (大溪) would foster conflict between the pan-green and pan-blue camps.
It is the old ethnic card the KMT trots out whenever the DPP or anyone else tries to present an alternative version of reality to the Alice-in-Wonderland vision the KMT and other Mainlanders prefer.
The KMT sees only the DPP as the instigator of polarizing conflicts, not its own slavish devotion to a man that others regard as a dictator, a man whose government was responsible for the arrest, imprisonment and murder of tens of thousands of people during the 228 Incident and the White Terror era. It is not Chiang that is polarizing opinion, but those who revile him, according to the KMT.
The head of the KMT’s Tainan chapter said that the removal of the statues was an effort to purge an important historical figure from the public’s memory — as if that could happen when remnants of the personality cult that Chiang and his son fostered mean the nation still has many parks, buildings and roads — not to mention coins — to remember him by, even if his birthday has not been commemorated as a national holiday since 1999.
And who can avoid seeing the smiling faces of Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) — who headed the secret police during the White Terror era — that are emblazoned upon T-shirts, postcards, plastic figurines and other souvenirs aimed at the Chinese tourist market?
There is not a chance that Chiang Kai-shek will be purged from the public’s memory. However, the continued veneration of Chiang ignores the contributions that so many others have made to this nation, especially those who fought to bring about democracy.
Taiwanese are expected to continue to tolerate the presence of statues of Chiang. Yet when efforts are made to commemorate those who fought against the totalitarianism of the Chiangs, such as naming a plaza at National Cheng Kung University after democracy activist Deng Nan-jung (鄭南榕), they are condemned because of the “political connotations” and the need to remain politically neutral.
The statues of Chiang have little artistic merit and even less historical merit. It is time they were all consigned to the scrap heap of history.
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