Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, has said that Taiwan is a beautiful place, because the US armed forces did not attack it during World War II, but attacked Okinawa instead.
It is astonishing that someone who was born and grew up in Taiwan, whose salary is paid by Taiwanese taxpayers and who is running for president does not know about the US Air Force’s heavy bombardment of Taiwan. It is regrettable that the KMT could nominate a candidate who cares so little about the nation’s history.
In a single mission — the May 31, 1945, air raid over Taipei — the US Air Force bombed and seriously damaged the Office of the Governor General of Taiwan, which is now the Presidential Office Building, killed more than 3,000 Taipei residents and left tens of thousands injured or homeless.
During the war, places in southern Taiwan, including Chiayi and Tainan, as well as Kaohsiung’s Gangshan (岡山) and Zuoying (左營), were home to Japanese army, navy and air force bases, making them prime targets for US bombing raids, so US B-29 Superfortress bombers began targeting them in November 1944.
I was five years old at the time. We lived in a three-story building opposite the main branch of the Third Credit Cooperative on Daren Road in Kaohsiung’s Yancheng District (鹽埕). Downstairs was my father’s Cidetang traditional Chinese medicine clinic.
When the Americans started bombing Taiwan, the Japanese colonial officials ordered Kaohsiung residents to evacuate to outlying mountainous areas as soon as possible. My parents took me, my three brothers and our baby sister to take refuge in a village called Chelongpu (車籠埔) in the foothills of Kaohsiung’s Dashe Township (大社), which is now Dashe District.
My father had a distant, unmarried cousin whom we children called “uncle,” and he had hired him to make herbal remedies in the pharmacy. Uncle volunteered to stay behind and look after the ingredients. My father tried to persuade him that life is more important than anything else, but he insisted on staying behind, saying that if there was an air raid warning, he would take refuge in the nearest bomb shelter.
From our refuge in the foothills, I saw B-29s flying toward Kaohsiung several times. Kaohsiung harbor was a strategic point where there was a concentration of Japanese navy and army units. In those days bombers did not drop their payloads very accurately, and on every mission they had to drop all their ordnance before returning to base.
Consequently, many Taiwanese were killed by US bombs. One day my father was informed that a 500kg bomb had fallen on our home, reducing most of it to rubble. He was devastated to hear that Uncle had lost his life because he had not gone to the air raid shelter. A few months later, the emperor of Japan announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, but we had lost our home and Uncle.
Over the past few centuries, Taiwan has played host to one ungrateful guest after another. There were the Dutch, the Tungning Kingdom, the Qing Dynasty, the Japanese and the KMT’s dynasty of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). The KMT, now in opposition, frequently adopts an attitude of surrender to communist China. It has forgotten the dying wish of its great leader Chiang Kai-shek to fight communism and never stand alongside the “communist bandits.”
What a shame that today’s KMT would rather make Taiwanese someone else’s slaves than the true masters of the nation.
Shih Ming-hsiung is a political victim.
Translated by Julian Clegg
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS