National Chengchi University late on Friday night said it had removed a bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), its first president, from its campus in accordance with a resolution passed in January at an internal meeting of faculty and student representatives.
The statue, which formerly stood at the university’s library, was relocated to Hua Hsing Children’s Home — founded by Chiang’s wife Soong Mayling (宋美齡) — in Taipei’s Shilin District (士林), the school said.
The internal meeting was held to decide which of two statues of Chiang would be removed, with the one in the library chosen by a vote of 54 to 37.
Photo courtesy of National Chengchi University
The other Chiang statue, which portrays him on horseback, remains on a hill on campus.
In an apparent attempt to downplay the issue, the university issued a news release about the statue’s relocation just before midnight on Friday.
Crediting Chiang as its first president, the university looked back on its history: It was founded by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in Nanjing, China, to cultivate party cadres and was later turned into the Central School of Governance. It took on its current iteration following its restoration in Taiwan after the KMT’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War.
Hua Hsing Children’s Home has served as a shelter for the children of deceased soldiers, poor families and households affected by typhoons or earthquakes, the university said, calling on the media to refrain from visiting it.
A campaign to remove the two statues of Chiang on the campus was in February 2016 launched by the university’s students, who plastered flyers bearing the names of 228 Incident victims on the statue in the library.
Over the past few years, a growing number of historians and academics have named Chiang as a leading figure in the Incident.
A motion to remove a statue was filed at the January meeting after 455 faculty and students in September last year voted on the school’s iConcern online polling platform to have them removed, while 442 voted to retain both statues.
In 2014, a student in the Department of Ethnology spray-painted “authoritarianism’s poisonous legacy” and “historical murderer” on the statute in the library.
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