The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) should not misrepresent the passion for revolution of White Terror-era victims as sorrow for pro-Taiwan independence supporters, the New Party’s youth wing said yesterday.
The group was referring to the Xinhai Revolution (辛亥), which toppled the Qing Dynasty and ended imperial rule in China, culminating in the founding of the Republic of China.
The group made the comments while paying their respects at a stele commemorating the victims of the White Terror era on the 72nd anniversary of the 228 Incident.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
“The KMT did not launch a massacre of so-called Taiwanese on Feb. 28, 1947. The purge took place during the ensuing White Terror era,” youth wing member Lin Ming-cheng (林明正) said.
The truth is that there were mobs attacking waishengren (外省人, mainlanders), but the KMT did not widely retaliate, Lin said.
That members of Unit 27 Chung Yi-jen (鍾逸人) and Chen Ming-chung (陳明忠) remain alive to this day is proof, Lin said, adding that even former Imperial Japan Army veteran Huang Chin-tao (黃金島) had only passed away in January.
The mass execution of political prisoners took place during the White Terror era in the 1950s, and most were Chinese Communist Party members or socialists, Lin said.
They were people who wanted Taiwan to be unified with the “communist motherland,” Lin said.
Youth wing member Su Heng (蘇恆) said that most White Terror victims, who are often used by the DPP to bolster its political credibility, recognized China as their motherland and wanted nothing more than to “stop the civil war and be unified in peace.”
The KMT did not like their ideas and suppressed them, but those who have taken up their mantle are now being suppressed by the DPP, using autocratic methods, Su said.
The mentality of non-coexistence with the Chinese Communist Party embraced by the then-KMT often led to the suppression of those who favored negotiating peace with the communists, youth wing member Wang Ping-chung (王炳忠) said.
The KMT lumped dangwai (“outside the party,” 黨外) politicians and pro-Taiwan independence groups together under the label of “communist sympathizers” and purged them, Wang said.
The DPP has distorted the victims’ passion for the revolution to hit a chord with independence supporters, Wang said.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration lauding the actions of “underground communist party members” during the Chinese civil war era, even as it purges those who want peaceful unification, is both ironic and hypocritical, the group said.
The group brought sunflowers — which it said represented the revolution’s fight for social justice and hopes for a unified homeland — and laid them at a public cemetery in the Liuzhangli area, where White Terror era victims were buried, Su said.
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