There won't be any marching bands, folk dancers, flag twirlers or acrobats in the square in front of the presidential office today; Double Ten National Day celebrations have been cancelled as a result of the 921 earthquake. People are not in the mood to celebrate. Those whose lives have been wrecked by the quake probably do not feel much like reflecting on political issues either. Yet the lack of National Day hoopla does afford an excellent opportunity to reflect on what exactly the significance of Double Ten day might be.
Double Ten day, as every Taiwanese knows, celebrates the Wuchang uprising in 1911, which led to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China. It doesn't matter that much of the mythology surrounding the uprising is erroneous; that the uprising happened by accident -- the conspirators' plans were exposed to the Qing authorities by a home-made bomb exploding; the conspirators either had to go ahead with an uprising or face almost immediate execution -- nor that the so-called father of the country Sun Yat-sen was in the US at the time, and far from hurrying home to lead the revolt, hurried to London to persuade the British government to back his claim to be the leader of the republican government. Oh well, few national myths conform to the historical record.
What is more to the point from the Taiwanese point of view is, of course, that at the time the uprising took place Taiwan had been a Japanese territory for 16 years and was to remain so for another 34. Then it was not returned to China as the government claims, but rather was given to the Chinese government to run pending a final settlement of the claims against Japan resulting from WWII. The subsequent flight of the Chinese government to Taiwan and its maintenance of a colonial regime in which locals were excluded from political power is hardly something for the Taiwanese to celebrate, nor is the fact that they have been forced to adopt the mainland-China derived national mythology of their occupiers.
So why celebrate Double Ten day in Taiwan. For 40 years after the mainland occupation this reason might well have been that it was impolitic not to. But today? The Wuchang uprising is not part of Taiwan's history, but of another country, a country to which Taiwan's link had been severed by the time the uprising took place and which has never, either legally or emotionally, been restored. Perhaps Taiwan is unique in that its National Day commemorates something that happened somewhere else to other people. It is, of course, a wonderfully apt metaphor for the confusion of identity which defines Taiwan's psychology.
What might therefore be substituted as a National Day if the government could ever admit the reality of the inappropriateness of Double Ten? How about July 15, the end of martial law in 1987? Then again there is Dec. 21, to commemorate Taiwan's first real democratic election -- for the National Assembly -- in 1991. Or there's March 23 to commemorate the election of the president in 1996 which marked the completion of Taiwan's formal democratization -- though some might think it unsuitable to select such a date while the winner of that election is still in power.
There is one more date worth considering, May 25. This commemorates the establishment in Taipei of the Republic of Taiwan in 1895 by a rebel movement unwilling to accept the abandonment of the island by the Qing and its succession to Japan. Since the republic collapsed after 11 days, there seems little to celebrate perhaps. But then, that it did collapse, and so quickly, contains a very useful lesson to Taiwanese about their society's fragility.
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