More than 100 people marched in Keelung yesterday in remembrance of those killed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) troops that landed on March 8, 1947, in the aftermath of the 228 Incident.
“It’s raining today [yesterday], and so it was on this day 62 years ago when the KMT troops landed at Keelung in the afternoon,” Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲), chairman of the 228 Care Association and a historian specializing in modern Taiwanese history, told people gathered at Keelung Harbor’s west pier.
“As soon as they disembarked, soldiers started shooting indiscriminately at people. There were dead bodies everywhere, in the city and floating in the harbor,” Chang said.
PHOTO: WENG YU-HUANG, TAIPEI TIMES
The troops were sent by dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to quell an uprising against KMT rule that broke out in Taipei on Feb. 28, 1947, and quickly spread.
Chou Chen-tsai (周振才) recalled the trauma.
“The KMT troops began to knock on doors randomly on the morning of March 9 searching for young people [who may have been involved in the uprising] and arrested my uncle and brother,” Chou said, adding that his uncle and brother had not taken part in the uprising and that his father was a KMT Keelung City councilor at the time.
“As soon as my mother — who was pregnant at the time — heard the news, she took a large sum of money and rushed to ‘buy’ their lives,” Chou said.
Chou’s brother returned after his mother bribed officials, but it was too late to save his uncle, who had already been executed and thrown into Tianliao River.
Although Chou’s father was a KMT member, he remained in hiding for months because the government accused him of helping anti-KMT guerillas by stockpiling rice.
“In reality he was handing out rice to poverty-stricken Keelung residents hit by the severe inflation at the time,” Chou said.
After observing a minute of silence, the marchers — holding flowers — proceeded through the city, recounting the details of massacre through a loudspeaker.
The march concluded on a bridge near the mouth of Tianliao River at Keelung Harbor, where marchers threw their flowers into the river to remember those who died.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods