The Memorial Foundation of 228 yesterday released a book on the 288 Incident to mark the 62nd anniversary of the first day of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s military crackdown on the uprising.
Project coordinator Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深), a board member of the foundation and an associate research fellow at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica, said the truth of the incident must be uncovered, but interviews with survivors and their families were not adequate because some did not want to talk about the trauma, while others did not offer new information.
The 332-page book, On the Side of Chuoshui River: An Oral Account of the 228 Incident, includes interviews with 33 people in Nantou and Yunlin counties.
In contrast with most of the literature on the subject, which focuses on the social elite and government officials, Chen said the book was about ordinary testimony.
On the evening of Feb. 27, 1947, a woman named Lin Chiang-mai (林江邁), who had been selling smuggled cigarettes in Taipei, was beaten by an agent from the Monopoly Bureau.
Lin was left unconscious on the ground and an angry crowd gathered and turned on the agents, who fired their guns into the crowd indiscriminately, killing a man named Chen Wen-hsi (陳文溪).
When monopoly agents were discovered pistol-whipping two children for a similar offense the following day, an angry crowd beat the agents to death. Nationwide anti-KMT protests and riots followed.
KMT troops from China were requested in early March to quell the disturbances and tens of thousands of people were killed.
Since the KMT returned to power in May last year, the KMT-dominated legislature has threatened to freeze the foundation’s funding. A KMT legislator floated the idea of canceling 228 Memorial Day as a public holiday.
Although President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) promised last Saturday on the 62nd anniversary of the incident to unfreeze the foundation’s budget, Chen Yi-shen said that the administration must do more than offer lip service once a year.
The head of the foundation Chen Chin-huang (陳錦煌), said it was a race against time to discover the truth as the survivors and their families were getting old.
“When the truth is unclear, we cannot talk about transitional justice or coming to terms with the tormenting past,” he said.
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