The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) should be required to open party archives to allow academics to search for a list of people targeted during the 228 Incident, a leading expert on Taiwanese history said yesterday.
“We talk a lot about recovering the KMT’s ‘ill-gotten assets,’ but for some reason, no one seems to talk about recovering the documents stored in the party archives,” Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History research fellow Hsu Hsueh-chi (許雪姬) said at a commemorative event held at the National 228 Memorial Museum.
The KMT has been reluctant to open its historical archives in the absence of a formal legal obligation, despite ruling the nation as a one-party state for more than 50 years, Hsu said.
Photo: Lo Pei-der, Taipei Times
“The most important documents we are missing are the KMT’s; we have only seen a small proportion of the material relating to Taiwan Province,” she said. “At the very least, KMT officials would have written down any decisions that were made. Because the party led the government, those decisions would have been what government agencies implemented, so in some ways, KMT documents are a step up from official archives.”
Information on decisionmaking from the archives could shed light on how and why 228 Incident victims were targeted, she said, adding that a “name list” of targeted individuals was the key “missing link” in recent research.
The 228 Incident refers to the crackdown launched by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime against civilian demonstrations following an incident in Taipei on Feb. 27, 1947. The event also marked the beginning of the White Terror era that saw thousands of Taiwanese arrested, imprisoned and executed.
“We do not know if the list of names [of 228 victims] was provided by a [Taiwanese] banshan [“half mountain,” a reference to those Taiwanese who went to China and joined the KMT during Japanese colonial rule], or by KMT sympathizers or others — but there must have been a list, because the regime was very methodical in making arrests,” Hsu said, adding that it was clear that intelligence agents had infiltrated opposition groups, enabling the extensive “payback,” which followed the uprising.
Other missing pieces included the division of labor between the military, police and intelligence services, as well as the exact fates of most victims, she added.
Based on the available documents, it is still impossible to determine the exact number of victims of the incident, National Central University history professor Lai Jeh-hang (賴澤涵) said.
Estimates for the number of people injured or killed range widely, from thousands to tens of thousands, with the 228 Memorial Foundation as of August last year having provided compensation in 2,288 cases, according to the foundation’s Web site.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS