The first thing I learned in historiography at Georgetown University where I got my Ph. D. in historia is that history is a dialogue between the past and the present.It is not judgment.A historian has to write – in Leopold von Ranke’s word – wie eigentlich gewesen or as factually seen. Many a historian in Taiwan seems unable or reluctant to practice their profession the way it should be.
Quite a number of historians, some maybe patronized by the government, joined to write a history of the February 28 Incident of 1947, which conveniently enabled President Chen Shui-bian to denounce Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek as the chief culprit of the bloody massacre that followed a spontaneous riot on that day.Other Democratic Progressive Party leaders followed suit, continuing to demonize Chiang, who was then in Nanking or Nanjing too deeply involved in an all-out campaign to defeat Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war to pay due attention to what was going on in Taiwan.He was even called the “executioner” of tens of thousands of people slaughtered in the incident, which begat a feud between native islanders and Chinese mainlanders, rekindling the Taiwan independence movement that began in 1928 but was quashed shortly afterward by the Japanese colonial authorities.
In their ongoing war on Chiang Kai-shek, who died as president in Taipei in 1975, the administration and the ruling party never tire of blaming him for masterminding the reign of terror that followed.Patronized historians continued to lend a hand with a trove of research papers.Then in the name of upholding transitional justice, the Chiang detractors are expunging the name of their hated dictator from an international airport, buildings, roads and streets, companies state-owned as well as privatized, and a memorial park.With the help of the historians, they are trying to describe Chiang Kai-shek as the source of all evils that have beset Taiwan.
Is Chiang Kai-shek that bad?
Of course, Chiang is not as good as his adulators say he is.Nor is he as evil as his haters want to portray him.
Take for instance the February 28 Incident, the sixtieth anniversary of which was marked at the end of last month.As the head of government, the generalissimo was ultimately responsible but he certainly wasn’t the chief culprit or executioner.Perhaps a patronized historian or two wittingly overlooked a report in the U.S. Department of State archive, which was published decades ago.The report was about a meeting between Chiang and U.S. Ambassador John Leighton Stuart right after the incident.Chiang professed he ws unaware of conditions on Taiwan.He relied on the findings of Pai Chung-hsi’s investigation mission that exonerated Chen Yi, the administrator-general of Taiwan.Chiang requested n independent report by Stuart, who complied.The independent report Stuart provided Chiang was prepared by the American consul in Taipei, who witnessed the riot as well as the massacre.
The man who started what has come to be known as white terror was General Chen Cheng, who assumed office as governor of Taiwan at the beginning of 1949 and reasserted martial law.In a new wave of arrests of persons charged with being communist sympathizers, many innocent people were falsely accused and summarily executed.The white terror continued after Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Taipei at the end of the year.Some Taiwan independence activists were imprisoned or executed, but by far most of the victims were mainlanders, including military officers and many a press worker.
The white terror and the personality cult as well as ideological indoctrination he inaugurated may pigeonhole President Chiang Kai-shek as an evil autocratic ruler of Taiwan.The fact, however, is that despite all this he was a good autocrat.The legacy he left Taiwan is the Republic of China on the island as an independent, sovereign state.With his resumption of office as president in March 1950 – he was forced to resign as president in 1949 – Chiang raised Taiwan’s status from province to sovereign state.His defeated troops evacuated from China compelled Mao Zedong to delay his “bathing Taiwan with blood,” which the United States eventually precluded after the outbreak of the Korean War on May 25.But for the defense force and American intervention, Taiwan would have been a province of the People’s Republic of China before the end of 1950.
Chiang Kai-shek was incorruptible.His Kuomintang government was by and large free of corruption.It controlled the runaway inflation.It promoted education.It completed a land reform.With U.S. aid, it began infrastructure construction to lay the ground for an economic takeoff.When he came to Taiwan, he faced the economy in shambles, with a per capita income less than US$50, much lower than the “wealthy” Philippines in the 1950s.He rebuilt the economy to pave the way for Taiwan to work the economic miracle of the twentieth century.And he groomed his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.The son who was elected president in 1978 started Taiwan’s democratization.In seeking reelection in 1984, Chiang Ching-kuo chose Lee Teng-hui as his running mate.Lee took over as accidental president on his death in 1988.Lee made Taiwan a democracy.
These are the facts many politicians ignore and want their voters to forget in their attempt to de-Sinicize Taiwan.They are trying to create myths that Taiwan has nothing to do with China.Do they want to forget it was Chiang Kai-shek whose insistence got of the return by Japan of Formosa and the Pescadores to China in the Cairo Declaration of 1943?Do they know the Taiwan Communist Party that launched off the independence movement was founded in Shanghai and both the Chinese Communists and Chiang’s Kuomintang fully supported that movement?
Facts are sacred to journalists as well as historians.They should record the facts as they see them, albeit politicians may distort or forget them.Journalists interpret news day after day, while historians compare facts of the recent and remote past to find out their relationship and influence on human society.
（本文刊載於96.03.12 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
王順民
(
11月22日 15:13
)
劉新圓
(
2007年10月4日 15:04
)
