The Ministry of Education recently launched an online learning resource on transitional justice. Beginning with a class on the 228 Incident of 1947, the Web site provides videos and extended readings organized in a thoughtfully designed online classroom. It compiles Taiwan’s most unsavory chapters of history into accessible pieces of content for people to brush up on their understanding of the historical background of authoritarian rule.
It sounds reasonable; thoughtful, even. However, the challenge that transitional justice faces is not that of a missing history class on the 228 Incident. Rather, it is by design that Taiwan has forgotten key elements of the past.
Textbooks make reference to periods of authoritarian rule, social unrest and political “incidents,” but are rarely explicit about who sent the orders, who executed them and who benefitted. Thus, what is left is an abstraction of violence. Responsibility is diluted, and episodes of history come to be understood as something that simply came and went as naturally as transitory rain. In this sense, the government’s new online resource is more of the same.
Consider South Korea. When South Korean students rallied against martial law in the Gwangju Uprising of 1980, they were quickly suppressed by then-South Korean general Chun Doo-hwan sending in troops to crush the protests. However, Chun was later arrested and sentenced to life in prison, and victims were compensated in the 1990s. Although Chun denied any wrongdoing, history bears the proof of his indictment. South Korea did not just teach about the tragedy; they held those behind it accountable.
Even more symbolic was when Chun’s grandson knelt before the families of the victims to apologize and name his grandfather as responsible for the massacre. It was not a historical lesson, but a practice of historical ethics where descendants account for the violence of their predecessors.
In comparison, Taiwan’s situation is nothing less than absurd. Central Taipei boasts the enormous monument to an authoritarian past, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. It is surrounded by various Zhongzheng roads, a name also referring to the former president and dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
This contradiction is a product of Taiwan’s competing versions of transitional justice in our classrooms and physical spaces. While textbooks emphasize democracy, rights and reflect on history, our cities are full of symbols commemorating authoritarian leaders. Students learn about transitional justice in school, but as soon as they step outside they are faced with a world steeped in the memory of power yet to be dismantled.
It is not just students, but Taiwanese society as a whole that needs to revisit history. The focus should not just be on facts, but ethics. While accountability remains hazy, the historical violence can be romanticized all too easily. Meanwhile, a strange situation has emerged where talking about 228 is written off as political manipulation, and discussing responsibility is equated with sowing ethnic division.
How did we get here? It is the result of an ingenious kind of sophistry that frames those in pursuit of accountability as troublemakers, and leaving historical power structures intact. What is politicized is not history, but its memory.
The ministry’s new learning resource of course has its place. History education needs space for new narratives and more publicly available resources, but if the symbols of historical memory do not change within our institutions, these efforts would be little more than window dressing.
Transitional justice has never been a question of just education — it is also about politics and ethics.
Historical amends are not achieved by simply “understanding one another;” they require narrative clarity as to who sent the order, who was harmed and who benefited from the enabling systems of power. Without this as a bare minimum, democracy is lost to institutional amnesia.
Liu Che-ting is a writer.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader
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