Academics studying the 228 Incident yesterday suggested the government bring in foreign perspectives to establish the facts of the tragedy.
Many believe that the full history of the incident has not been revealed and that the incident is the source of "ethnic discord" in the country, the academics said.
The panelists made the comments at a two-day symposium hosted by The Memorial Foundation of the 228 Incident in Taipei yesterday. The symposium was held to commemorate the 61st anniversary of the 228 Incident, which started on Feb. 27, 1947, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime suppressed an uprising, leaving tens of thousands dead, missing or imprisoned.
"Many important issues of the incident have been overlooked until now and we were unable to examine [discrepancies in] official statements on the event without the viewpoints of foreigners," Su Chung-yao (蘇崇瑤), an associate professor at Providence University, told the audience.
Su published a paper that compared accounts of the incident from three perspectives: the official A Research Report on the 228 Incident published by the Executive Yuan in 1992, research conducted by George Kerr, who worked at the US Consulate in Taipei at the time of the massacre and coverage of the event by foreign media outlets.
The official report concluded that the suppression occurred because the uprising had spun out of control. Foreign coverage found that the uprising was purposely created by the executive administrator of Taiwan, Chen Yi (陳儀), with the intention of using the revolt as an excuse to request that China dispatch reinforcements to Taiwan, Su said.
James Wang (王景弘), a senior reporter, shared with the symposium a paper on analyses of the New York Times' reports on the 228 incident.
"The New York Times' coverage served as important historical records of the brutality of the KMT regime and the demand of the people of Taiwan at that time that they would rather be governed by the UN or the US than by the Chinese," he said.
A number of foreign guests were also invited to express their views on the tragedy.
Joung Hwa Kim, a professor at South Korea's Chungbuk National University, said that one of the major findings of the many studies on the incident was that dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was the main party behind the incident that eventually led many Taiwanese people to develop Taiwan-centered consciousness.
"The spirit, however, does not seem enough for Taiwan to obtain independence easily," Kim said. "Taiwan needs international support for its independence line. Aside from this, the biggest obstacle is its close connection with China. Taiwan is getting both threats and conciliation from China."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching