The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is teetering. Soon, it could well lose power, and the whole edifice might come tumbling down.
The privileged few in the higher echelons are guilty of not listening to the public. In an attempt to rally his troops, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), whose approval rating stands at about 9 percent, spoke about the KMT’s “victory over the Japanese in the Second Sino-Japanese War and Taiwan’s retrocession,” while forgetting to express his gratitude to Taiwanese for giving the exiled Republic of China (ROC) party-state a place to stay.
Next, he targeted former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), who had spoken of his own experience of recent history, trying to force Lee to talk of the Taiwanese experience of “the war against Japanese aggression” and promoting the KMT party-state through feelings of enmity toward Tokyo.
Public imagination is often muddied by the manipulations of ignorant and ill-meaning regimes. However, in the end, history usually takes care of itself.
When Lee left office and the Democratic Progressive Party took power, he was at pains to emphasize that Taiwanese and those who came over from China after World War II would have their own experiences and memories of historical reality.
He spoke about the different factors behind people living together in the nation trying to formulate some kind of common destiny, and of the importance of mutual understanding. Lee, despite having been president and KMT chairman, was no darling of the fundamentalist faction within the colonialist, Chinese-style party-state. In fact, his brand of localization was its antidote. Having exorcised itself of him, the party essentially denied itself the possibility of its continued localization or regeneration, consigning itself to the gradual process of digging its own grave.
What Taiwanese are now afraid of is what tattered legacy the party-state might leave behind, and if it will be possible to tear it down.
The vast majority of Taiwanese never chose to become Japanese subjects. They became so because Taiwan was ceded to a victorious Japan by a defeated Qing Dynasty. During World War II, Taiwanese fought on Japan’s behalf. Why was it that Taiwanese went from welcoming their “motherland” to hating China?
The ROC, assuming control of Taiwan on behalf of the Allies after Japan left at the end of the war, occupied Taiwan and took it as a colony, suppressing the populace and, within two years, instigated the 228 Incident, a massacre by any other name. Then-governor Chen Yi (陳儀), sent from China by then-president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), had previously visited Taipei in the 1930s to attend the World Expo as the ROC representative. He was a ROC VIP full of praise for what Japan had done to its Taiwan colony.
After 1949, the ROC on Taiwan was but the remnants of that China. It ruled by breaking the local populace, through the White Terror era and the long years of martial law, for which it should seek atonement not just from Taiwanese but also from the people who followed them from China, many of whom have tried to start a new life for themselves, identifying as Taiwanese.
The nation needs to be reborn: an act of saving itself. The ROC system, melded with the idea of China, is a historical dead end, a wasteful project of vying with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on “the mainland.”
No matter how much Ma continues to talk of the “war of resistance against Japanese aggression,” it is still part of the history of the PRC, which took over from the ROC. Why is it that Taiwanese, after being ceded to Japan, went from resisting the Japanese to being pro-Japanese, the exact opposite of how they reacted to their Chinese masters?
Of course, Taiwan does not belong to Japan, but then neither does it belong to China. Taiwan belongs to the people who live here; the property of neither the KMT nor the Chinese Communist Party.
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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