After decades of standing sentry over the enormous bronze statue of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) at his eponymous memorial in Taipei, the honor guards’ clacking boots are no longer heard reverberating around its cavernous hall.
However, they have not gone far: Since Monday, the guards have moved just outside the memorial park’s Democracy Boulevard. When weather permits, a six-member guard is to march from the north and south entrances to the park and converge by the steps leading up to the hall every hour on the hour between 9am and 5pm. They will also still perform the flag-raising and lowering ceremonies as usual, ensuring the popular tourist draw remains mostly unchanged.
The move was decided following negotiations between the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of National Defense, and announced following a meeting on transitional justice progress moderated by the Executive Yuan earlier this month. The meeting was to precede another to be held later this year, meaning we might see some more developments in transitional justice in the coming months.
The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall is the symbolic heart of the thorny issue of what to do with symbols of authoritarianism. Ever since Taiwan started down the path of democratization, debates about the hundreds of statues of the former president and dictator abound.
The question is familiar to any country with a complicated past — making it a universal question, because which country has a spotless record? The options often boil down to either removing a statue or leaving it unchanged, but rarely is that a satisfying solution. Especially when handling symbols of an authoritarian past, democracies need to carefully consider public opinion and cannot be perceived as trading one form of autocracy for another.
Considering this, it is no wonder that the memorial hall has remained virtually unchanged in the intervening decades. Conflicting calls to tear down the statue or leave it as a reminder of the nation’s past — for good and for bad — are equally valid. Many proposals have been raised over the years, ranging from transforming it into a human rights memorial or a monument to all the nation’s leaders, to some more creative proposals like moving the legislature to the site. In 2022, the Transitional Justice Commission even held an exhibition featuring proposed designs to inspire the collective imagination about how to repurpose the hall and surrounding park.
While it is important to keep focusing on the hall and the 760 statues of Chiang that remain standing nationwide, it also threatens to overshadow the significant progress that has already been made toward transitional justice. For one, relocating hundreds of the Chiang statues to the Chiang Kai-shek Cihu Statue Park is a creative solution that preserves the symbols while simultaneously creating a new attraction where Taiwanese and visitors alike can learn about the nation’s history.
While the memorial might not have changed much aesthetically, it is functionally radically different than when it opened in 1980. Liberty Square at the other end of the park is where the nation’s most important protest movements have been held, and the exhibition hall inside now highlights Taiwan’s unique arts and culture.
Perhaps most importantly, the continued discussion over how to transform the hall is itself a tool of transitional justice. It is an exercise in the very democratic process that generations of activists have fought for, and a reminder of how far Taiwan has come from its authoritarian past.
Although small, this latest change in the location and function of the honor guard is the product of democratic consensus-building and an instructive lesson in incremental progress.
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