T he 228 Incident

While the West’s understanding of China is based on limited knowledge, our understanding of Taiwan is based on near total ignorance. We lack a clear sense of its history and culture. There is only a fuzzy impression of Taiwan as a foil to “Red China.” It’s the “good” China, the “democratic” China. It’s the China of “free markets and free people.” Over the eight years I spent in Beijing, I often heard other expats refer to it as the “real” China.

Americans have been conditioned by the Cold War to assume that democracy and free markets are inextricably linked, but in Taiwan—as in much of the world—this hasn’t always been the case. Before the late 1980s, Taiwan was a one-party dictatorship of the Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek and afterward his son Chiang Ching-kuo.

For its first four decades, a period known as the White Terror, Taiwan was under martial law. Free speech was curtailed. Political dissent was violently suppressed. Opponents of the regime were imprisoned, tortured and executed. But the steady stream of repression that took place in the background during that time paled in comparison to the absolute carnage that inaugurated it.

Control of the island then known as Formosa passed from its Japanese occupiers to the Nationalists at the end of World War II, and a few years later, the KMT would relocate its government there following their final defeat in the Chinese Civil War.

Initially grateful for being freed from the Japanese, Formosans grew increasingly hostile to Nationalist rule due to economic mismanagement, corruption and their exclusion from top government posts. These resentments simmering under the surface boiled over on Feb. 28, 1947. The previous day, officials from the state monopoly bureau had brutalized a widow for selling smuggled cigarettes and gunned down a bystander. A mob stormed the bureau, beat an official to death and burned trucks full of tobacco and alcohol.

The Nationalist government responded by mobilizing the 21st division of the army to “pacify” the restive population. Patriotic students were deputized into militias called the Loyalty Service Units under Hsu Te-hui, a Taiwan native with ties to organized crime.

On the other side, local leaders, activists and journalists formed the 228 Incident Settlement Committee in an attempt to channel the outrage of the mobs into lasting political reforms. After nearly a week of unrest, they submitted a document dubbed the 32 Demands to Chen Yi, the KMT’s administrator, who was incensed by the committee’s “shameless” impudence.

Chen nevertheless attempted to placate the activists to stall for time until army units could arrive from the mainland. When they finally showed up on March 7, the slaughter began in earnest.

Streets ‘littered with dead’

One contemporary report from The New York Times cites an American observer on the scene:

For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead. There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped.

In addition to machine-gunning scores of unarmed people in broad daylight, the Nationalist regime quietly disappeared hundreds of activists, including journalists and many of the leaders of the Settlement Committee. They were shoved into the back of cars to be tortured and executed by members of the Special Activities Unit, a newly formed secret police under KMT military intelligence.

A Chinese victim of the White Terror (Wikimedia Commons)

All told, it’s estimated that anywhere between 18,000 and 28,000 people died. Nearly 40 years of martial law followed. The White Terror, as it came to be known, was like McCarthyism on steroids. Around 140,000 were charged with being Communist spies, often on the flimsiest of pretexts, and imprisoned. The Chinese poet Bo Yang was jailed in 1968 for his poor choice of words in translating a Popeye comic.

The 228 Incident was erased from the history books and public discussion of it remained strictly verboten until 1987, when democratic reform was implemented.

The memory hole

While the past is fixed, our perception of it is constantly in flux. Sometimes our understanding of events is shifted by the emergence of new facts that challenge old assumptions and overturn existing narratives. But more often our interpretation of history is influenced by subtler forces in ways that are imperceptible.

Why do we remember June 4 but not Feb. 28? Why are we intimately familiar with the brutality of Kim Jong-il but not that of South Korea’s Syngman Rhee? Why are we well acquainted with the crimes of Fidel Castro while few among us could even recognize the name Fulgencio Batista?

American outrage over and memory of atrocities committed abroad is selective.

In 1984, George Orwell famously wrote “he who controls the past, controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past.” In the book, there are three continents locked in constant war, and each time the alliances shift, the history books are rewritten so that “Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”

But control over the American public’s perception of international events doesn’t have to be so ham-fisted and totalitarian to achieve the same basic effect. Generally speaking, Americans are largely not concerned with what goes on beyond our borders and even less so with the history of other nations. We don’t have to be forbidden from talking about the misdeeds of US allies—if no one reminds us of them every year for 30 years, we’ll never learn or just forget.