by Andre HoolihanOn February 27th, 1947, agents from the Kuomintang-government backed tobacco monopoly confiscated contraband cigarettes from a woman in Taipei’s Datong district. When the woman demanded their return, she was struck with a pistol. As the agents fled the scene, an agent shot and fatally wounded a bystander.
In the days that followed, semi-organized Taiwanese groups attempted to push the Kuomintang out of Taiwan, but by early March a military force arrived from China and began more than a month of indiscriminate killing and looting. These events would come to be known as the February 28 incident, a date which marked the start of martial law and violent government repression in Taiwan. Today, February 28th is a day of remembrance dedicated to those lost to the years of terror. Some, however, use the February 28 incident as an excuse to tell a different story. For scholars like Chu Hong-yuan, a researcher and professor at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica and a former Kuomintang (KMT) National Assembly member, it is an opportunity to justify the actions of the former military government. “I would say it all started with a mistake.” That was how Chu described the incident, an uprising which is estimated to have led to the death of ten thousand Taiwanese civilians. He has spent the past thirty years researching the February 28 incident, and has written over fifteen papers on the subject. “You have to understand,” he explained to me, “for the Mainland soldiers who came to reclaim Taiwan, the Taiwanese, who had spent fifty years under Japanese rule, looked too much like the Japanese. It created a psychological complex for the soldiers.” He blames this distrust for the hostilities which grew between Taiwanese citizens and Mainland Kuomintang soldiers in the wake of Taiwan’s retrocession in 1945. Chu argues that the incident itself was sparked by communist infiltrators, both in youth groups and organized crime, who worked to inflame the situation in the wake of the shooting on February 27th. He also alleges that reports of violence were overstated by the Western media, ostensibly to justify the position of pro-Taiwanese independence factions within the United States Government. Contemporary foreign observers and modern historians tend to refute Chu’s research. Reports published in the West described startling brutality, and excerpts from Chiang Kai-shek’s personal journals suggest that he was aware of the extent of the violence in Taiwan: “The soldiers have landed in Taiwan and restored order… It is evident that we will need to rely on military power in recaptured territories.” Chen Cui-lian, a history professor at National Taiwan University, advocate for transitional justice, and fellow February 28 incident researcher argues in her work that the incident was in fact the fault of high-level Kuomintang leaders, up to and including Chiang Kai-Shek. In an article published in February of last year she argued “Chiang Kai-Shek held the highest office of government, sent soldiers to Taiwan, and shielded Governor Chen Yi in the wake of the incident. How can we believe that he was not responsible?” Ultimately, the answer to this question seems to lie in politics. Chen, who feels no love for the Kuomintang, is comfortable placing the blame squarely on their shoulders, while Chu, whose fortunes have been shaped by the Kuomintang for much of his life, is unwilling. It is unfortunate that the study of history, especially the study of a moment as pivotal as the February 28 incident, should be so thoroughly shaped by politics. a
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May 2024
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