TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — Politicians from across the political spectrum attended ceremonies and delivered speeches on 228 Peace Memorial Day, an official holiday to remember victims of the February 28 Massacre.
It led to the White Terror when tens of thousands of people died and many more were imprisoned and tortured. Extrajudicial political murders continued into the 1980s.
The subject was taboo under Kuomintang (KMT) one-party rule and only started to become a subject of widespread discussion in the early 1990s. Parents were so afraid their children might speak of it openly and the family punished that they kept it a secret. So generations grew up with no knowledge it had ever happened, much like the Tiananmen Massacre in China.
In 1995, then President Lee Tung-hui (李登輝) of the KMT issued a public apology for the massacre and in 1997 the 228 Peace Memorial Day was made an official holiday. It was a big deal at the time.
That politicians come out to reflect on Taiwan’s authoritarian past, regardless of which party they represent, is a valuable exercise. Hopefully, it will continue to give meaning to “never forget."
Ill-gotten gains
In the 2000s, then-President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) made some transitional justice efforts but was stymied by an uncooperative government bureaucracy that was mostly staffed by KMT-era personnel and an opposition-controlled legislature. He changed some names, including Chunghwa Post and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, but most of his changes were reversed when the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) came to power.
In the runup to the 2016 national elections, then-DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) included transitional justice and dealing with the ill-gotten gains that the KMT had seized or stolen during the martial law era in her campaign platform.
That year the DPP for the first time won an outright majority in the legislature. Finally empowered, the DPP set about passing laws to deal with both issues.
They moved fastest on creating a commission to seize the KMT’s ill-gotten assets. The KMT had promised to deal with their assets for years but somehow never got around to it.
They no doubt rue that mistake because if they had they might have been able to pay off expenses like severance pay and pensions on their extremely bloated payroll, and gotten away with it. Now the KMT is in danger of going bankrupt.
That the DPP moved fastest on this issue was no accident as it seriously weakened the KMT by taking away what had been a huge advantage for them. For decades the KMT, dubbed the “richest political party in the world,” could easily outgun the relatively poor DPP by throwing around large amounts of cash during election season.
The DPP likely knew that because in the past the KMT had handed out party positions like candy the party would struggle financially to cope with the costs of shedding all these “professional tea drinkers and cigarette smokers” in their ranks. After years of suffering under the authoritarian regime and then in elections where they could not compete financially, it is unlikely the DPP felt the slightest bit of sympathy for the KMT’s newfound financial crisis.
Transitional Justice Commission
In December 2017 the legislature passed the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice (促進轉型正義條例) that provided the legal framework to establish the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC), in May 2018. It operated for four years and had its life extended twice, but was disbanded in May 2022 and replaced by a cross-Cabinet committee named the Department of Human Rights and Transitional Justice.
Controversially, the act defined the "period of authoritarian rule" from Aug. 15, 1945 to Nov. 6, 1992. That period starts with the surrender broadcast of Japan's Emperor Hirohito and ends with Temporary Provisions against the Communist Rebellion.
The KMT objected that this clearly only targeted them and that it should also include the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945). Others objected that it did not apply to colonial rule over Indigenous peoples.
The DPP responded that the Japanese era was too long ago, and the already existing Council of Indigenous Peoples handles that issue. They also probably did not want to create diplomatic tensions with Japan.
It also touches on long-standing contentions between the KMT and DPP on the issue of Japan. A significant portion of the KMT’s identity is its resistance to the ruthless invasion of China by Japan, and is in a sense their own "never forget" issue.
On the other hand, the DPP views the issue from a Taiwan perspective that the KMT was worse than the Japanese government, which was civilian for most of that era. This leads them to view the Japanese colonial era through rose-tinted glasses, and gloss over the indignities and repression Taiwanese suffered as colonial subjects.
The TCJ was legally bound to tackle these five issues:
1. Providing for public access to political archival records.
2. Removing authoritarian symbols and preserving sites where injustices were committed.
3. Redressing judicial and administrative wrongs, restoring historical truth, and promoting social reconciliation.
4. Settling and utilizing ill-gotten party assets.
5. Handling other matters pertaining to transitional justice.
How well did the TCJ accomplish these tasks? Aside from No. 4, the answer is not much, as we will explore another time.
