The last time Mrs Hsieh came to Cihu Park in Taoyuan was almost 50 years ago, on a school trip to the grave of Taiwan’s recently deceased dictator. Busloads of children were brought in to pay their respects to Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正), known as Generalissimo, who had died at 87, after decades ruling Taiwan under brutal martial law.
“There were a lot of buses, and there was a long queue,” Hsieh recalled. “It was a school rule. We had to bow, and then we went home.”
Chiang’s body is still there, under guard in a mausoleum at the end of a path that winds through misty bamboo past a still lake broken only by light drizzle and a drifting swan. But the other end of the park is the truly ghostly part, dotted as it is with hundreds of statues, almost all of Chiang.
Photo: Chiang Chih-hsiung, Taipei Times
Some stand in a circle — a group of Chiangs gathered for a casual conference or a campfire chat. Elsewhere, dozens are lined up in what looks like a choir of Chiangs. There is Chiang on a horse, Chiang in a seat, Chiang reading a book or holding a hat. A few have Chiang surrounded by adoring children, and paths are lined with his busts on concrete pedestals. Almost all the Chiangs wear his famous smile.
There were no statues here in the 1970s, says Hsieh. They have been moved here over time, taken from public spaces but not destroyed, standing here as an uncanny honor guard around the mausoleum.
“It’s a strange place,” says Hsieh. “There are so many statues. It would be scary at night.”
.jpg)
Photo: Paul Cooper, Taipei Times
The veneration shown to Chiang when Hsieh was a child is no longer a given. Chiang was the ruler of the Republic of China until he and his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) were driven out by the communists in China’s civil war. They and millions of supporters retreated to Taiwan in 1949, establishing the ROC in exile, with Chiang planning to retake China one day. Under his almost-four-decade-rule — now known as the “white terror” — an estimated 3,000-4,000 people were executed and 140,000 imprisoned for actual or perceived opposition to the KMT.
After his death in 1975, Taiwan transitioned to a democracy, and criticism of the leadership present and past became possible. But Chiang’s legacy is still fervently debated here.
In 2018, the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP), which was born of the opposition to martial law, established a transitional justice commission to investigate and atone for the KMT’s acts against Taiwan’s people. In 2022, a subsidy program offered grants of up to NT$100,000 for local authorities to change or remove “authoritarian symbols” to help end a “culture of political veneration.”
Taiwan has more than 300 roads named after Chiang, almost 60 schools and dozens of localities, including the central district of Taipei. A handful have changed name in the past five years: a road in former capital Tainan is now named after a prominent victim of the massacre of February 1947, when thousands of protesters were killed by KMT troops.
Last week, a DPP legislator challenged the government on its slow progress over the more than 700 statues that are still standing, saying it should be more proactive in encouraging take-up of the subsidies. Shih Pu (石樸), an official with the Executive Yuan’s Department of Human Rights and Transitional Justice, said part of the issue was that many of the statues were on military sites, which did not want to remove them.
The modern KMT, now in opposition, has apologized for past acts but opposes the DPP’s transitional justice efforts, which it says amount to a political witch-hunt. Some members have likened a proposal to remove the largest Chiang statue — a six-meter-high sculpture in central Taipei — to the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001.
Opinions are divided but nuanced. Prominent campaigner Lin Lee-tsai , whose father was a victim of the massacres, said her family will “set off firecrackers” if the Taipei statue is removed. But some say Chiang’s crimes must be balanced against the economic boom he ushered through, and his fight against the Japanese and the communists.
“Chiang did a lot of controversial things,” park visitor Mr Huang said. “But he also made contributions. If he hadn’t come to Taiwan back then, it would probably be ruled by the communists now, and most Taiwanese do not want to be governed by Xi Jinping (習近平).”
Hsieh says there’s no point erasing history, and the statues look OK where they are in schools. Also, she adds, laughing, Cihu park is spooky enough. It doesn’t need any more.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS