Overseas Community Affairs Council Minister Steven Chen (陳士魁) yesterday said he disagreed with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) assessment that the 228 Incident was a movement of popular resistance against government injustice.
Chen, who also serves as chairman of the 228 Memorial Foundation, said that the description was inaccurate because the vast majority of the victims of the crackdown did not participate in any “resistance activities” against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration.
His remarks put him at odds with the KMT’s official party line regarding the 1947 incident, which was announced during a KMT conference headed by Ma in 2006.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
His disparate view has aroused interest because Chen is not only a KMT member, but has long been seen as an ally of Ma.
“That is not what happened. Of course some people engaged in armed revolt, but most of the members of the elite did not,” Chen said, adding that he has expressed his concerns to Ma.
He said such victims included his uncle, Chen Cheng-yueh (陳成岳), a Japanese-educated dentist who lost his life during the series of purges that targeted the core of Taiwanese intellectuals and elites in the aftermath of protests that began on Feb. 27, 1947.
Chen took over as chairman of the state-funded 228 Memorial Foundation in August last year.
Chen made the comments during the book launch of a collection of photographs of elderly 228 survivors and family members.
His comments echoed the views of Chang An-man (張安滿), a 228 Memorial Foundation board member who lost his grandfather, father and uncle in April 1947.
During a 228 memorial event in Hualien last year, Chang told Ma that he was unable to accept the KMT’s view of the Incident.
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
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
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