Statues of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) dotting school campuses and public spaces nationwide are the subject of fierce debate at this time of year — the anniversary of the 228 Incident — and increasingly so in the past five years.
On Wednesday, National Sun Yat-sen University announced it was establishing a committee to determine the fate of a Chiang statue on its campus. The university is using the opportunity to get students, faculty and alumni talking about the issue.
On Tuesday, the Tainan City Government removed a statue of Chiang from a roundabout, the third such removal in the city this month.
Last month, National Chengchi University passed a motion calling for its statues of Chiang to be removed as part of efforts to promote human rights and transitional justice.
These are not isolated incidents. Two years ago, the Tainan City Government removed statues from 14 elementary and junior-high schools as part of a concerted effort to rid the city of symbols of dictatorship.
The Cihu Memorial Sculpture Garden, adjacent to Chiang’s mausoleum in Taoyuan’s Dasi District (大溪), where many of the statues and busts of the former president removed from schools, parks and other places have been discarded since 2000, is getting pretty crowded. There are already more than 200 orphaned statues there.
There is plenty of debate surrounding whether these statues should be removed. Does it constitute historical vandalism, a whitewashing of Taiwan’s past? What purpose do these statues serve? They are memorials to a late dictator.
All memorials are political spectacles. It is one thing to have these statues at Chiang’s mausoleum or premises specifically to commemorate him. However, placed in schools, the statues legitimize Chiang and condone his actions. In parks and other public spaces, it enforces a sense of shared narrative.
Over the past few years, more young people have rallied against this narrative, in many cases when marking the 228 Incident anniversary.
Last year the dictator’s statues were defaced in numerous locations, including Yilan, where someone wrote “Taiwan’s Hitler.”
When a nation’s schools and public spaces are dominated by images of mostly one person, specifically a national leader, it starts to look suspiciously like the trappings of a personality cult, a symbol intentionally employed to legitimize a regime. When that leader came from outside and headed a foreign regime, it looks like a symbol of colonialism.
When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) first came to Taiwan, having statues and busts of its leader erected at schools and in public spaces served a definitive purpose. This same need led Chiang to order the 228 Massacre. That is why it is unconscionable that the KMT opposes efforts to have those same statues removed.
The government is attempting to bring about transitional justice. It is seeking the truth, holding those responsible for wrongdoing to account and introducing a more desirable social reality, allowing people to move on.
This is an opportunity. Local governments can remove the statues of a dictator, symbolic of a cruel and unjust past under a foreign regime, and replace them with meaningful celebrations of individuals or events that have made real, positive contributions to Taiwan. Better still, recast these symbols from the melted-down bronze or steel of the dictator’s statues. What more fitting symbol of transitional justice could there be?
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
A recent piece of international news has drawn surprisingly little attention, yet it deserves far closer scrutiny. German industrial heavyweight Siemens Mobility has reportedly outmaneuvered long-entrenched Chinese competitors in Southeast Asian infrastructure to secure a strategic partnership with Vietnam’s largest private conglomerate, Vingroup. The agreement positions Siemens to participate in the construction of a high-speed rail link between Hanoi and Ha Long Bay. German media were blunt in their assessment: This was not merely a commercial win, but has symbolic significance in “reshaping geopolitical influence.” At first glance, this might look like a routine outcome of corporate bidding. However, placed in
China often describes itself as the natural leader of the global south: a power that respects sovereignty, rejects coercion and offers developing countries an alternative to Western pressure. For years, Venezuela was held up — implicitly and sometimes explicitly — as proof that this model worked. Today, Venezuela is exposing the limits of that claim. Beijing’s response to the latest crisis in Venezuela has been striking not only for its content, but for its tone. Chinese officials have abandoned their usual restrained diplomatic phrasing and adopted language that is unusually direct by Beijing’s standards. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs described the
RSS