With the 68th anniversary of the 228 Incident approaching, President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration has come under fire from Academia Sinica modern history researcher Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深), who said the administration is misrepresenting history and mitigating the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) responsibility for the 228 Incident.
The very nature of the 228 Incident, a historical tragedy that is the by-product of a clash of different ethnicities, is that it was a massacre of civilians by the KMT government, Chen said.
The 228 Incident refers to an uprising that began on Feb. 27, 1947, against the then-KMT authoritarian regime and the resulting brutal crackdown that left tens of thousands dead and led to nearly four decades of martial law.
Screen grab from Internet
The KMT government under then-Taiwan governor Chen Yi (陳儀) pursued a policy of demilitarizing local villages and arresting alleged criminals based on a list provided by villagers informing on each other, Chen Yi-shen said.
Many innocent people were implicated, and even some of the civilians who were on the committee handling the issue were later arrested, Chen Yi-shen said.
There was an element of using the Incident as a way to exact personal revenge, and the 228 Incident was in essence a vindictive slaughter by the KMT government, Chen Yi-shen said.
Photo: Ting Wei-chieh, Taipei Times
When Ma — in his capacity then as KMT chairperson — defined the event on the party’s Central Standing Committee meeting in 2006 as one in which the government had forced citizens into revolt and that it was not caused by ethnic differences, it was controversial and met with protests from many of the Incident’s victims, Chen Yi-shen said.
Ma’s comments represented a conscious effort to depart from the traditional KMT definition of the Incident, which was that it was a revolt sparked by communists, and that the military intervention was necessary to maintain the stability of Taiwanese society, Chen Yi-shen said.
The 228 Incident occurred as the KMT government was embroiled in its second civil war with the Chinese Communist Party.
However, Ma’s views on the Incident were subjective and could be said to distort the history of the Incident, as Ma is overlooking the evident ethnic conflicts in the incident, Chen Yi-shen said.
The 228 Incident stemmed from the KMT government officials, commonly called waishengren (外省人) to distinguish them from native Taiwanese, being unable to understand the local ethnic groups, as well as from the rampant corruption of KMT officials, Chen Yi-shen said.
That the government forced the civilians to revolt was only part of the Incident, Chen Yi-shen said.
Many innocent waishengren were also embroiled in the Incident, which causes many of the families of the Incident’s victims to find the Ma administration’s definition unacceptable, Chen Yi-shen said.
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