Unlike an election year, this year saw no large-scale noisy demonstrations to mark Peace Memorial Day, the day to remember the Feb. 28 Incident of 1947. President Ma Ying-jeou went to Yilan to attend a meeting to mark the 66th anniversary of the 228 Incident, where he asked Minister of Education Chiang Wei-ning to increase the proportion of the teaching about the bloody suppression of rioters in school history textbooks.
In Taipei, there was a much smaller “Remember March” demonstration, in which Democratic Progress Party leaders from its chairman, Su Tseng-chang, on down took part to call for the payment of compensations by the Kuomintang to the families of the 228 victims, the teaching of the incident in school lest the ruling party should be accepted as a democratic political party, and self-awakening, self-reliance and self-strengthening of the people of Taiwan to resist persecution. The protest march was organized by the Taiwan Nation Alliance, a successor to the Grand Alliance for the One Hundred Million People Hand-in-Hand to Protect Taiwan, which organized a successful island-wide rally on Peace Memorial Day in 2004 to help President Chen Shui-bian get re-elected.
Of course, the people of Taiwan have to remember the massacre's untold thousands of victims who died in the name of suppressing the spontaneous riots after Taiwan Provincial Administrator-General Chen Yi's guards strafed with heavy machine guns a crowd protesting the accidental killing of an onlooker by an armed agent of the Tobacco and Wine Monopoly Bureau. The onlooker, Chen Wen-xi, was killed by a stray bullet on a Taipei street while the agent hit a cigarette-selling widow. The machine gun strafing killed four men in the protesting crowd and it was a signal for the spontaneous riots in Taipei and riots also occurred in other cities of the island. Nonetheless, there is no need to add a page or two to history textbooks for the incident that changed irrevocably the precarious honeymoon between the islanders and the Chinese mainlanders following Taiwan's retrocession to the Republic of China into a bitter feud that in time spawned a movement for Taiwan independence.
The reason is simple.
History is a dialogue between the past and the present. No judgment is required. All that is needed in the history textbooks is the statement of the facts about the incident, which are already presented in the textbooks. If new facts are found, they may be added. Should mistakes be found in the facts presented, they should be corrected. It does not have anything to do with the proportion of the teaching about the incident. That is probably the reason why the education minister reminded the president that he could not order textbook publishers to increase the proportion.
Su turned anachronistic in demanding the Kuomintang pay compensation with funds raised by selling its ill-gotten party assets. He seems to have forgotten the compensations has long been paid. Or does he want the ruling party to make a refund to the national treasury? The Kuomintang was not a democratic party, but it has been one for a long time. It had been a revolutionary party before the Manchu Qing Empire was toppled. It was an undemocratic party under Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo.
But it is Chiang Ching-kuo who started Taiwan's democratization, allowing the Democratic Progressive Party to be founded before martial law was lifted, and under the chairmanship of Lee Teng-hui it was already a democratic political party. Otherwise, the New Party and the People First Party could not have come into being. And Lee forced the Kuomintang to oust him to form the Taiwan Solidarity Union. Nobody doubts the Kuomintang is a democratic political party after it was voted out of power by the Democratic Progressive Party in 2000.
Do the people need to be self-awakened, self-reliant, and self-strengthened to resist persecution? What persecution? Perhaps, Sun forgot to add “political” or “government” before “persecution.” As a matter of fact, the people of Taiwan have long been self-awakened, self-reliant and self-strengthened. And there is no political, governmental or any other form of persecution in Taiwan. If he is not anachronistic, he is getting irrevocably senile.
There is one more thing Su may have deliberately or conveniently forgotten. It was a Kuomintang government under President Lee when Peace Memorial Day was proclaimed. He apologized for the wrongs done in the 228 Incident on behalf of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government and ordered the erection of the Cenotaph of the 228 Dead in 228 Peace Memorial Park and the payment of compensation to the bereaved families of the victims. He did so to disarm the bitter islander-mainlander feud which, however, was stoked by the Democratic Progressive Party after it came to power in 2000 to all but destroy the hard-won communal harmony in Taiwan.
The opposition party did not use Peace Memorial Day as a rallying point for anti-Kuomintang people this year, because there are no elections. It did not do so last year, too, for the presidential election took place more than one month before Peace Memorial Day. Let us hope it will stop stoking the communal feud next year and the years thereafter to heal the seriously disturbed communal harmony to help Taiwan survive as a viable democracy.
〈本文僅供參考，不代表本會立場〉
（本文刊載於102.03.04，The China Post）
彭蕙仙
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2017年3月9日 09:18
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