February 28th is my birthday, and I’ve occasionally Googled the date to see what famous events come up during the date. One of the first results is almost always a massacre — the infamous February 28th (02/28) Massacre in Taiwan, which killed approximately 18,000 to 28,000 people.
The massacre hasn’t been the most reputable or covered in Taiwanese history, due to four decades of intense censorship and martial law. And it’s not the most taught or well-known massacre in American history books or classes for a simple reason: Taiwan is our ally.
In my learning of history, it’s far too common to see a black and white picture of the good guys and the bad guys. Mao Zedong and the Communists who repressed mainland China, for example, were the bad guys. The Kuomintang Nationalist regime, who opposed Mao Zedong and the Communists, was the good guys.
But the Kuomintang also repressed their citizens (like the Communists), and brutally so.
This repression has been historically repressed by the Taiwanese government’s history of corruption, propaganda, and the use of violence to suppress dissent.
The February 28th Massacre is one of the worst massacres in Taiwanese history, and now it’s finally being honored and remembered in the Taipei 228 Memorial Museum.
According to Michael Forsythe at The New York Times, the late 1940s were an incredibly tumultuous time in mainland China and Taiwan. The Japanese had just invaded and brutalized China during World War II, killing millions of civilians and raping countless women (most notably during the Rape of Nanking).
Before the Japanese invasion, China was undergoing a civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists — the Nationalists controlled the government and occupied the Chinese coasts, while the Communists occupied obscure rural regions of the island. This meant the Nationalists disproportionately bore the brunt of the Japanese invasion.
China paused its civil war while Japan invaded, but after Japan was defeated, the Communists and Nationalists resumed their civil war.
Also, the Nationalists had a reputation for corruption, which led the wave of the war to turn towards the Communists. After the Allies beat Japan, they gifted the Nationalists a Japanese colony off the coast of China: Taiwan.
What most people don’t know about Taiwan
Growing up, I thought of Taiwan as basically an extension of China. It is an erroneous assumption, but growing up in a Chinese-American family, this was what I was taught. Most of the people who lived in Taiwan were ethnically Chinese. Most Taiwanese people in America I met were ethnically Chinese.
In my mind, the governments of China and Taiwan just had some fundamental differences.
But the history of Taiwan is actually much more complex than most people know. Yes, today, most of Taiwan is ethnically Han Chinese.
According to Amy B Wang at the Washington Post, the Qing Dynasty gave up control of Taiwan to Japan in 1895. Japan ruled Taiwan for 50 years as a colony, until it lost to the Allies during World War II.
Former Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou said the Japanese did both good and bad things — prior to Japan’s occupation, Taiwan was undeveloped and rural. But the Japanese brought major construction projects like the Chianan Irrigation system and Wusanto Reservoir, which greatly benefited farmers. The Japanese also played a pivotal role in improving living conditions in Taiwan and modernizing the island.
This is not to say everyone in Taiwan during its 50 years under Japanese rule had a positive experience. There were two famous uprisings in Taiwan, including the 1915 Tapani Incident and the Wushe Uprising of 1930.
After the second uprising, professors Thomas Ward and William Lay at the University of Bridgeport say Japan sought not to severely repress the Taiwanese people, but to empower the aboriginal people of the island.
This policy ended up paying off for the Japanese Imperial Army: the Takasago Volunteers were famously a segment of the army composed of Taiwanese aborigines, famous for their bravery during the war. One Takasago Volunteer, Teruo Nakamura, was the last Japanese holdout during World War II, who finally surrendered in December 1974.
So it’s no surprise today that some Taiwanese people who lived through the period view the Japanese more fondly than they did the Kuomintang. But multiple factors contributed to this — including the absolute cruelty of the Kuomintang regime.
Taiwan under Nationalist rule
Initially, Ward and Lay note the Han Chinese inhabitants of Taiwan originally celebrated the end of Japanese rule. Wang says many Taiwanese people hoped the Kuomintang would give them greater autonomy over their own country, but the reality was very different.
Chiang Kai Shek was still fighting a civil war in China, so he appointed Chen Yi, a chief executive of the Kuomintang, as the governor of Taiwan. Chen Yi’s oversight of the island led to substantial unrest between the Taiwanese and the new Nationalist regime. Although he was not corrupt himself, he was known to have tolerated his corrupt subordinates.
The corruption and exploitation of Taiwan by Kuomintang officials were notorious, leading to skyrocketing inflation, unemployment of Taiwanese workers, and food shortages. One headline in a March 21, 1946 edition of the Washington Daily News read “Chinese Exploit Formosa Worse Than Japs Did.”
Tensions would boil especially in early 1947, on February 27. According to Wang, armed Kuomintang agents from the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau tried to seize contraband cigarettes from a widow in Taipei. She was trying to sell the cigarettes outside a teahouse, and a Kuomintang agent struck her on the head with his gun. The woman later died.
According to Thomas Shattuck at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, this led to a subsequent protest against the agent’s brutality. During the protests, Kuomintang agents opened fire on the crowd, killing one person and wounding more.
As a result of the escalation, mass protests started outside the Tobacco Monopoly Bureau the next day, on February 28. During that protest, a group of protestors beat two Tobacco agents to death.
That same day, an even larger protest coalesced at Chen Yi’s office. This protest resulted in violence as well — Nationalist soldiers fired on the crowd without warning, killing several protestors. Across Taiwan, protests erupted against the Kuomintang regime and at government offices.
After this incident, an uprising started across Taiwan, with local Taiwanese revolting against “Mainlanders” from the Republic of China. In some parts of Taiwan, these uprisings were successful. In Taipei, organizers seized a radio station and broadcasted the uprising.
For a week between February 28th and March 7th, the uprising continued. A “Settlement Committee” of highly educated professionals, students, and legislators investigated the “Monopoly Bureau Incident” and made a list of 32 demands to Chen Yi, demanding local Taiwanese people in the office, as well as freedom of speech and press.
Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek, however, sent thousands of Nationalist troops to the island as reinforcements to stop the uprising in mid-March.
What followed was a crackdown by Kuomintang forces, where soldiers fired indiscriminately at innocent civilians. During this time, many students tried to quell the uprisings and keep order on the streets — but the Kuomintang killed many of these students.
During these uprisings and subsequent crackdown, Chen Yi said he loved the Taiwanese and promised no Taiwanese people would be prosecuted for the rioting.
American correspondent Peggy Durdin, in a May 24, 1947 article in The Nation, said the Kuomintang put down the revolt with “brutal repression, terror, and massacre.” The first thousand people they killed were killed indiscriminately, and then there was more method to the madness. Kuomintang forces ended up jailing and hunting down the highly educated, in particular, including students, businessmen, intellectuals, doctors, and journalists, to make sure criticism of the regime would be minimal.
Some prisoners would be killed as they marched toward a river, and others were killed in more of an execution manner to send a message to others skeptical of the regime.
Durdin reported that no foreigner saw an armed Taiwanese civilian.
The massacres would go on for a month, and at least 18,000 Taiwanese civilians were killed, but this is a lower range of the estimate (some estimate as many as 28,000 people were killed).
The White Terror
Cheng Yi issued martial law in Taiwan following the 2/28 Massacre.
In 1949, Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao Zedong, and Chiang’s whole government had to flee to Taiwan. To maintain their hold over Taiwan, the Kuomintang continued the policy of martial law.
The 2/28 Massacre and its disappearances simply could not be discussed. It was forbidden to talk about killings or disappearances, and Wang notes many missing family members were just not mentioned to prevent retaliation from the Nationalist regime.
Wang says the culture of silence and martial law that made the 2/28 Massacre unspeakable made the whole episode a “hidden holocaust.”
In 1987, martial law was lifted in Taiwan. But many Taiwanese civilians who lived through the massacre were understandably reticent to talk about the massacre because they feared trouble.
Taiwan would rapidly democratize, having its first free legislative elections in 1992, and its first democratic presidential election in 1996. This was such a fast transition to a peaceful democracy that is incredibly impressive.
In 1995, Taiwanese president Lee Tung-hui apologized fr the 2/28 Massacre, and now, near the Presidential Palace, the “2/28 Peace Park” commemorates the victims of the massacre. The 228 Memorial Foundation, which was funded by the Taiwanese government, gave $234 million in USD to almost 10,000 victims and family members of the incident in 2017.
Takeaways
Is there any use in talking about a massacre that happened 75 years ago?
The fact is the killing didn’t all happen on February 28th, but it started on February 28th. But the Taiwanese government made such a rapid transition towards the end of the 20th century from silencing all conversation about the massacre to apologizing for it and commemorating it.
The 228 Memorial Foundation’s chairman, in 2017, suggested the government accept the fact that Chiang Kai-Shek was responsible for the executions and the incident, and the National Chengchi University called for the removal of all Chiang Kai-Shek statues due to his role in the massacre and White Terror.
Today, Taiwan continues to repent for its repressive past. By comparison, China, Taiwan’s biggest geopolitical rival, has not repented for the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.
Regardless, the 2/28 Massacre is the greatest sin in Taiwan’s young history.
But the government’s pivot provides a model of how a country should reckon with its shameful past, a process almost every country in the world must sincerely engage with.
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This post was previously published on CrimeBeat.
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