Amid the dispute between Taiwan and China over the Whampoa Military Academy, which has been renamed the Republic of China (ROC) Military Academy in Taiwan, former minister of national defense Kao Hua-chu (高華柱) made an intriguing comment, saying: “The temple is with them, god is with us.”
The “temple” refers to Whampoa Island in China’s Guangzhou Province, where the academy was founded, and “god” refers to the ROC Military Academy in Kaohsiung’s Fengshan District (鳳山).
The spirit of Whampoa is the “orthodoxy” formed by each academy president from the first, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), to the 32nd, Hou Chia-lun (侯家倫), along with its teachers and students.
The core value of the orthodoxy is to “safeguard the ROC and protect the ROC Constitution,” and all Whampoa graduates should strive for sacrifice, unity, and love for the country and its people.
The academy has been relocated several times. Founded in 1924, it moved from Guangzhou to what was then the Chinese capital, Nanjing, three years later and to Chengdu in 1937 due to the Japanese invasion.
In 1950, it moved to Fengshan after Chengdu fell into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government relocated to Taiwan.
The majority of the more than 1,000 graduates of the 23rd class — the last Whampoa class in China — either died in battles on their way to western China or died defending Chiang as he departed from Chengdu Lantau Peak Airport for Taiwan in 1949.
The school was in China for only 26 of its 99 years, but it has been in Taiwan for almost 73 years.
The spirit of Whampoa has long been internalized locally, so it is no longer appropriate to confine the debate to unnecessary arguments over which place the spirit should be named after.
The call to erase “Whampoa” from the spirit would be a redundant move — just as redundant as the call to rename the ROC Air Force Academy’s “spirit of Jianqiao” the “spirit of Gangshan” after its location in Kaohsiung’s Gangshan District (岡山), as well as renaming National Defense University Fuhsingkang College’s spirit of Fuhsingkang the “spirit of Beitou (北投),” to reflect its home in the Taipei district.
Would the quality and quantity of the ROC Military Academy’s enrollment surge to the level of National Taiwan University or other prestigious institutions next year if it were to rename its spirit of Whampoa?
More than 90 percent of graduates of the 23rd Whampoa class and those who went before them have been reunited in heaven, not to mention the earliest graduates from the first six classes during the KMT-CCP First United Front in the 1920s.
Former army general Hsu Li-nung (許歷農), a graduate of the 16th class who is now 104 years old, is perhaps the only alumnus in Taiwan who attended the academy in China, while most remaining alumni in China did not fight side by side with the KMT against the Japanese.
Besides, historical data show that there were 22 major battles during the Japanese invasion, but the CCP did not participate in them.
If retired military officers from Taiwan were to take part in the academy’s 99th anniversary celebrations in China, what shared topics would the Taiwanese and Chinese alumini have except those represented by visiting the original Whampoa site?
Liao Nien-han is a lecturer at the ROC Military Academy.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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