Final comments on whether Chiang set up 2-28

In Formosa Betrayed, George Kerr’s foundational work on the 2-28 massacre, he describes the provision of intelligence on Taiwan to the US government by the Republic of China (ROC) government in Chungking during WWII, saying:

"In addition to these reports on subversion potential, and on specific communications and industrial objectives, we also received from Chungking a long report on Formosan-Chinese leaders, and on Formosans who were exiles in China."(p14)

The report had been prepared by an exiled Formosan whom Kerr identifies as a notorious schemer, but this brief remark is a window into a world generally neglected in historical writing on 2-28. After opening that window, we can ask: did Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT set up the massacre so they could murder the local leadership, which otherwise might oppose KMT rule?

The problem of historiography
Formosa Betrayed opens with a discussion of US policy toward Formosa during the war, then presents the background of Chen Yi, who would become governor of Formosa in 1945, and then briefly covers the expectations of Formosan leaders in 1945. Kerr then moves on to the arrival of the US and ROC leaders in Taiwan, and from there to a narrative of the development of the revolt.

Similarly, in A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947, another commonly cited work on 2-28, Ramon Myers and Lai Zehan, after setting the stage in the first chapter, move on to a detailed discussion of the people of Taiwan under Japanese rule, followed by a chapter describing the establishment of KMT rule in Taiwan.

This pattern of presenting the Taiwan experience of Japanese rule, followed by the beginning of KMT rule on the island, is true of almost all presentations of 2-28’s history, long or short. Even the Wiki page on the event offers a Background that briefly describes the experiences of Taiwan and its people under Japanese rule, followed by a somewhat longer explication of KMT rule. It then presents the revolt.

There’s a key element missing: this discourse emphasizes the continuity of the Taiwanese experience with Japanese Formosa while ignoring the continuity of KMT experience with Japanese Formosa.

Instead, the KMT in Taiwan in 1945 is always presented as if it had simply parachuted in from China with little or no prior knowledge of Taiwan. Chen Yi’s trip to Taiwan and background is often mentioned, but the KMT’s extensive knowledge of Taiwan and Taiwanese in the prewar era typically draws no attention. Kerr, for example, writes:

“Chiang's personal power within China derived from his consummate skill in playing off one powerful Party or Army faction against another and his family alliance with the leading industrialists and financiers. In mid-year 1945, the so-called Political Science Group was the faction momentarily in the ascendant at Chungking. When a temporary committee was established to plan for the "Provisional Government of Taiwan Province," a member of this group became the Chairman.

This was Chiang's friend General Chen Yi.”(p47)

Kerr provides detailed information on the relationship between Chen Yi, the Soong family, and Chiang Kai-shek, yet tells us nothing about this committee or of the KMT’s knowledge of Formosa. What was its understanding of Formosa? What were its information sources?

Instead of presenting a chapter on the extensive and detailed knowledge the KMT had of Taiwanese and their politics on Formosa, most writers simply give Chen Yi’s background in Fujian and his trip to Taiwan. This unconsciously signals the reader that no other knowledge exists or is necessary. Thus, Chen Yi’s Taiwan-related background comes to stand in for the KMT’s background on Taiwan.

This neglect of the KMT’s connections to Formosans and its knowledge of their political positions functions as an apologetic for Chiang and the KMT in its own right. If the reader never learns of prior deep KMT knowledge of Taiwan, the reader will never make the connection to possibility that Chiang planned it all. Indeed, that possibility is disallowed by the discourse.

It also underpins further apologetic positions, such as the oft-heard “Chen Yi misled Chiang” or “Chiang was too distracted by events in China” and so forth. Such comments only make sense if the analytical context is that the KMT and Chiang were completely ignorant of Formosa prior to the KMT's arrival there in 1945, and Chen Yi was the Party's sole major connection to Taiwan. But that is totally untrue.

As we have seen in my two other posts (here and here), the KMT had deep knowledge of Taiwan’s politics and its major leaders. But there’s another issue with Chen Yi I’d like to highlight.

2-28 was a reprise. When Chen Yi was governor of Fukien province, he imprisoned and killed students protesting for stronger anti-Japanese members, along with members of the People’s Political Councils. According to Kerr, Chen Yi brought in the big state monopolies and Japanese businesses, and drove thousands of small traders into bankruptcy.

“In the period of Chen Yi's governorship the Province of Fukien was systematically looted. Hot-headed students demonstrated, rioting broke out again and again, and Chen Yi reacted without mercy. The brutality with which students were tortured and killed in Fukien set something of a record even for China”(p55).

The province was “systematically looted” according to Kerr. Sound familiar?

When Chen Yi was posted to Taiwan, there were protests from both Chinese and from expatriate Formosans living in China. Indeed, it was Formosans who were familiar with Chen Yi’s record from Fujian who were among his biggest critics after he took over Taiwan. These vociferous criticisms and predictions were of course known to the KMT and to Chiang.

Did Chiang set up 2-28? Either Chiang understood the consequences of Chen Yi’s appointment and meant for something like the revolts in Fujian to happen so that a generation of Formosan leadership could be wiped out, or he was completely indifferent to the fate of Taiwan, or he was stupid beyond belief.

Yet remember, when you pick, that whatever his innumerable faults, one strength Chiang had was strong political skills...

UPDATE:
Great comment

Anonymous Anonymous said...
Actually quite some research has been done on the preparation committee you mention (especially by Taiwanese historians and published in Chinese). [mt: yeah, so its influence on the construction of the discourse on KMT entry into Taiwan is limited]. Among other things, the committee did not have any Taiwanese members when it was founded in April 1944. CKS insisted on putting some Taiwanese on only after the first few months, but even then their influence remained restricted. The whole thing was more for show and to appease the few voices within the KMT, who argued for Taiwan's incorporation into China, most of whom were banshan.

The committee eventually did publish a report and made all kinds of suggestions about the future rule of Taiwan, it even mentioned the possibility of some kind of self-rule. Of course, all those suggestions remained non-binding in the end and the government opted for what was in fact a military occupation. One of the main reasons being that the KMT didn't even know if the Taiwanese, in particular the soldiers, were actually going to welcome them (remember that Taiwanese in general were still despised by the KMT high echelons during the war and seen as collaborators and/or slaves of the Japanese [sound familiar?]).

I think it's also important to remember the larger historical context here, namely that the KMT had never considered "getting back" Taiwan before the Cairo Conference in late 1943, when the allies winning the war had already become an increasingly realistic scenario. However, they were surely not prepared for the rather sudden end of the Pacific War. This is easily forgotten, but by August 1945 there was just no internal consensus among KMTers of how to rule Taiwan after the war, which was another reason CKS opted for the military occupation. The military occupation had nothing to do whatsoever with what the committee had been working on.

Nothing of this exculpates CKS of course, quite to the contrary. He might have not really been able to anticipate the situation in Taiwan, but as you said, he did know Chen Yi and he gave him all the powers to do as he wanted.
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Latest Taiwan news piece: Did Chiang plan for 2-28 to happen?

Downhill on gravel: not fun

Interesting news: a Chinese official said that China needs to have more contact with Taiwan's elected officials. Apparently some in China are coming to the conclusion that its policy of ignoring the DPP is hurting its ability to influence Taiwan...

Taiwan Sentinel hosted a good piece on Ma's discussion with Jerome Cohen, which basically consisted of Ma spouting nonsense about history and Cohen nodding indulgently and letting the former president say whatever he wanted, unchallenged. Cohen was asked by the local China people to address Ma as "Mr Ma" and not president, etc. Ma's twisting of history is the normal KMT practice...

...speaking of KMT history twisting, I am exploring the idea that Chiang Kai Shek probably planned for 2-28 to occur. I looked at it in a previous post. But I developed the idea further in my most recent Taiwan News column:

The KMT had abundant information on Japanese Taiwan, including lists of prominent leaders and their political positions, the Home Rule movement, and extensive information on the island's political and industrial infrastructure. In Formosa Betrayed George Kerr avers that "In addition to these reports on subversion potential, and on specific communications and industrial objectives, we also received from Chungking a long report on Formosan-Chinese leaders, and on Formosans who were exiles in China."

Moreover, Taiwanese in KMT China were closely watched by the KMT, especially after the war began in 1937. Arbitrary arrest and detention of Taiwanese in China was common, and many, even those working for the KMT, concealed their Taiwanese origins. In Fujian the local government set up internment camps for Taiwanese and hundreds were arrested, interned, and had their property confiscated.

The highest echelons of the KMT handed down the KMT's Japan-war policy of identifying Taiwanese as Japanese empire subjects like Koreans and Okinawans. It's hard to imagine how decision-makers in KMT could be aware of Taiwanese and could possess lists of who and what was important in Taiwan, including the Home Rule movement, and yet not know what would happen when it oppressed Taiwan.

The KMT was well aware of the home rule movement in Taiwan. These contacts began quite early, right after the KMT was formed. Years ago a Taipei Times editorial on the perennial topic of KMT historical revisionism observed:

It is also worth noting that when Lin Hsien-tang (林獻堂), the father of the Formosan home-rule movement, met Tai Chi-tao (戴季陶), a close associate of Sun Yat-sen, in Tokyo in 1913, Tai told him that the KMT was too busy in China to provide any assistance in Taiwan and that if the Taiwanese wanted to remedy the harshness of Japanese colonial rule they should look to Japanese liberals for help.

...that was in 1913. In fact Lin had also talked to prominent Chinese intellectual Liang Qiqiao, who had fled to Japan and remained there until 1912, and Liang had told him the same thing.

But let's not forget, during the entire Japanese period Taiwan was a political issue in Japan's domestic politics, and the KMT could hardly have failed to be aware of this. For example, in the early 1920s one of the domestic political parties was a champion of the Home Rule movement. Moreover, Taiwanese student organizations formed in major cities in China after 1922, hoping to garner KMT support by advocating a Han-based nationalism. This movement opposed the Taiwanese home rule movement, but still saw Taiwan as a nation separate from China, and incorporated strains of Leninist and Communist thinking.

The KMT would also have been aware of Japanese repression and Taiwanese resistance, of the revolts the island had suffered. They would have known that Taiwan was revolt-prone...

There is no question: the Chiang and his KMT would have had minute, extensive knowledge of the Taiwan's politics...

Of interest: Ma was criticized this week by deep Blue KMT ideologue Alex Tsai for saying that Chiang should be held accountable for 2-28. LOL.
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Was Chiang Responsible for the 2-28 Massacre? Yes of course.

The March 2, 1947 telegram. Academia Historica via Taiwan News.

“Anyone with basic common sense can determine that Chiang is the one who should be held responsible,” Chen said (Japan Times).

Soon I must remove him , the Baron thought. He has almost outlasted his usefulness, almost reached the point of positive danger to my person. First, though, he must make the people of Arrakis hate him. Then - they will welcome my darling Feyd-Rautha as a savior .

A new telegram from 1947 published this month confirms, if any further evidence were needed for evidence-based minds, that KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek provided troops to Chen Yi, governor of Formosa, to murder the Taiwanese who had resisted KMT occupation. The wonder is not that there is disbelief about Chiang's role in the massacre. The wonder is that we are still asking the stupid question of whether Chiang is responsible.

The oddity of this discourse stands out. There's very little literature attempting to absolve Stalin or Pol Pot of their crimes. There is for Hitler, but only because he still has worshipers (precisely!). Why the struggle over Chiang's responsibility for 2-28? Same as for Corporal Schicklgruber: partly because there is enormous pressure from the KMT which reverberates down through time, as well as constant steering from pro-KMT academics that skews assessments of Chiang, and KMT funding for those who want to write about him, to block any negative presentations of their culture-hero Chiang Kai-shek, Joshua to Sun Yat-sen's Moses. The man has a personality cult, after all, with its own massive temple-memorial in downtown Taipei.

Several reports this week on the new information. Japan Times:

Among the new evidence is a letter dated March 2, 1947, sent by Taiwan Gov. Chen Yi to KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek informing him that he had requested Chief of the General Staff Chen Cheng to send more troops to crack down on civilian protests.

While Chiang publicly said he did not agree to send the troops until March 7, the March 2 letter is the newest proof that Chiang, who died in 1975, should shoulder most responsibility for the massacre, said Chen Yi-shen, an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.

Published even earlier is a March 4 telegram that Chen Yi sent to Chiang requesting more troops from the mainland.

The telegram above requests army units with "superior qualities" to su4 qing1 (肅清) "eradicate" the protesters in Taiwan, whom he labeled "bandits". There's absolutely no question about the intent of the language. It's quite clear.

It was always been clear. Kerr observed in Formosa Betrayed that Chen Yi was simply playing for time while the army, equipped with hastily painted over American weapons and vehicles, arrived to kill the protesters. Taiwan News reported:

National Taiwan University Professor Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮) said that the historians had been looking for the critical document of a telegraph issued by Chen Yi but to no avail, and the discovery has proved the assumption that Chen on the one hand tried to buy time by promising reform and appealing to the native Taiwanese not to take to the streets, but on the other hand pushed Chiang to send troops across the sea to end the uprising.

Ming-yeh and Gary Rawnsley have a well documented historical essay from 2001 on Chiang's culpability. They argue that Chiang did not intend that the response be violent, but his control of the faction-ridden bureaucracy and military was poor. The recent telegrams lay that set of apologetics, often put forth by pro-KMTers (which the Rawnsleys are not), forever to rest. The Rawnsleys lay out some of the old arguments for Chiang's culpability:

That the violent response to 2-28 went against direct orders issued by both Chiang Kai-shek and Chen Yi has been contested. Chen Yi-shen (陳儀深), for example, has advanced three key points that together make a compelling argument. First, why did Chiang not punish those who disobeyed him? In fact, Chiang rewarded Zhang Mu-tao, Chen Yi, and Peng Meng-qi for their military actions. Second, according to former members of the Taiwan Garrison Command, many individuals were singled out for execution on the orders of Chen Yi. Finally, temporary martial law‖ was proclaimed in Taiwan from February 28 to March 1, 1947, and then from March 9 to May 15, 1947. According to the law of Nationalist China, temporary martial law‖ could only be formally recognized when the highest local commander (Chen Yi) asked for official consent from the central government (Chiang Kaishek).

Their discussion of the then-documentary evidence is thorough and interesting, and contends that the factionalization of the KMT and the army was a major factor in the handling of the 2-28 revolt. Their conclusions:

Our conclusion is that, according to archival evidence, Chiang Kai-shek must bear a share of the responsibility for 2-28 in the following ways. First, Chiang was responsible for Chen Yi‘s appointment in the full knowledge of his record for violence in previously held administrative positions. Second, Chiang was preoccupied with the civil war in mainland China at the time, and was therefore vulnerable to misleading information, especially information that Communists were responsible for 2-28. In other words, Chiang Kai-shek was guilty of placing far too much trust in Chen Yi, and of having too little confidence in other sources of information. Third, the style of politics that Chiang Kai-shek had engineered allowed factionalism to dominate the administration and the military both in China and in Taiwan. During the crisis of 2-28, factional struggles were so intense and complicated that even Chiang could not exercise ultimate control over different local commanders. Nevertheless, we are unable to hold Chiang Kai-shek directly responsible for the massacre unless further archival evidence reveals otherwise.

It's a historians paper, very conservative, and it relies on archival evidence, which the Rawnsleys make clear is subject to new findings. The conclusion is reasonable, so long as you only think about the archives, and it is one that the KMT has attempted to steer historians into reaching.

But, the political reality is something else. The idea that Chiang would permit Chen Yi to amass an army in Fujian, and then transport it to a large productive island which he could use as a base for independent rule, without Chiang's express permission and approval, is absurd. Dictators do not operate that way: they trust no one, even close subordinates and especially close subordinates, and they do not hand them large armies for independent operations without good reason and without good control. There is no way that Chiang did not know what Chen Yi intended to do with those troops -- Chen Yi had already done so in the 1930s when he was governor of Fujian and massacred rebellious soldiers. Indeed, Chiang had known that. One could just as well argue that Chiang realized that if Formosa was going to be looted, Chen Yi was no man to scruple at killing to accomplish it.

The political reality is that Chiang had to know what he was doing and why, or else it wouldn't have happened. Chiang had people in Chen Yi's organization watching Chen Yi and reporting to Chiang, because that is how organizations everywhere in the Chinese world are conducted, from cram schools to the President's office (the army's political officers were gone as a result of the war and not to be reinstituted until 1950 when the KMT had to clamp down on the army to maintain control in Taiwan). Moreover, Chiang had a stream of independent reports on the situation in Taiwan, some of which suggested that Chen Yi be replaced because he was stirring up a revolt, and when the revolt occurred, that Chen Yi's administration was a major cause. Indeed, the Americans and local newspapers had told Chiang so months in advance of the massacre.

Much of the discussion of Chiang's culpability hinges on the (unspoken) assumption that Chiang would have acted to right the situation, had he known/properly understood/had not been distracted. This is what normal people would do. Hence it is typical to construct a set of explanations of why Chiang didn't act sooner. But Chiang is not a normal person, but a murderous dictator who ran a brutal police state. What if that assumption is wrong?

Why did Chiang retain a subordinate who was known to brutal -- whom Chiang knew was brutal and a terrible administrator because he had been told so again and again when Chen Yi was running Fujian Province -- and likely to stir up a revolt? Why would he retain that subordinate in Taiwan who he had repeated warnings about? Why was Chen Yi permitted to brew up a revolt? One interpretation is that Chiang was busy with the civil war and distracted, etc. We've all heard that. Indeed, after Chen Yi was removed from Taiwan, he was sent to run Zhejiang Province.

But another is: his known brutality is precisely why Chiang left him in Taiwan. Here was an island fresh out of Japanese hands with a wide range of people who were "tainted" by long association with the Japanese, who would have to be suppressed. Remember what happened to the individuals in the collaborationist Wang Jing-wei government: most of them were liquidated. But Chiang couldn't simply walk into Formosa and execute everyone, he needed an excuse. And Chen Yi obligingly furnished him with one...
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Blast from the Past: Harper's Magazine, September 1963 Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies

The famous old tofu street off the Miaoli 62 east of Dahu.

I was reading Ong Iok-tek's Taiwan: A History of Agonies when I encountered a cite from an article I had never seen before, "Chiang Kai-shek's Silent Enemies" by Albert Axelbank (Harper's Magazine, Sept, 1963):

If a poll were taken now to determine what status Formosans want for their island, I am sure that at least a two-thirds majority would favor independence. Of course, such a poll is impossible since just the mention of the words "independence" or "self-determination" on Formosa is taboo. But responsible Formosan leaders, both Kuomintang and opposition members, have told me that more than 90 per cent of the people desire the establishment of an independent Formosan republic — shunning both Communist and Nationalist Chinese ties.

This comment ought to give pause to the increasingly common claim in the media that support for independence in Taiwan is "rising" -- everyone familiar with Taiwan history knows it has had majority support in Taiwan since the arrival of the KMT in 1945. The article is very comparable to Douglas Mendel's 1970 classic The Politics of Formosan Nationalism in its brutally frank revelations of KMT rule on Formosa. Both Mendel and Axelbank lived on Taiwan at the same time. Axelbank writes:

From late 1960 till the middle of 1962 I was the bureau manager on Formosa for United Press International and I watched a steady flow of repressive acts directed against the population by the Nationalist government. I traveled widely over the island and spoke to hundreds of Formosans, including city mayors, provincial officials, merchants, doctors, soldiers, teachers, farmers, and pedicab drivers. Usually I took with me a Japanese interpreter since most of the Formosans preferred to speak Japanese although a few had received degrees at American universities and spoke fluent English. 

Mendel reported that he too spoke Japanese in discussing the KMT. Think Taiwaneseness is a creation of the Chen Administration? Rising in the present era? Axelbank observes:

I have often started to address a group of Formosans as, "You Chinese . . ." only to be pointedly told: "We are Taiwanese, not Chinese." (Taiwanese is the Japanese as well as Chinese name for Formosans.) There is, incidentally, very little intermarriage today between "mainlanders" — as the Chinese are called — and Formosans. Not long ago I heard a Formosan student say in a journalism class: "If I married a Chinese girl, my mother would lock me out of her house."

As many scholars have observed, the colonizer creates the identity of the oppressed through the acts of repression which demonstrate to the locals that colonizer and colonized are different and the colonized are inferior. It was the Japanese and the KMT who taught the Taiwanese that they were Taiwanese. Axelbank describes the regime in pointedly colonial terms:

Thus, in the 1,500-man National Assembly — it elects the President and Vice President and amends the Constitution — there are fewer than forty Formosans. In the Legislative Yuan (Parliament) of over 500 members, no more than two dozen are Formosans. There is only one Formosan in the Cabinet — the Minister of the Interior. There are no Formosa-born ambassadors. And in the 600,000-man military today — of which Formosans provide more than 75 per cent of the ground troops — the number of Formosan officers above the rank of colonel can be counted on both hands despite the existence of nearly 1,000 generals and admirals. In many police units, such as the Peace Preservation Corps of the Formosa Garrison Command, Formosans are almost nonexistent.

This tradition continues today: recall that President Ma appointed mainlanders to most high appointed positions... Axelbank also met opposition leaders:

When I visited the home of a noted Formosan opposition provincial assemblyman, he turned up the volume of his radio "so that police won't be able to tape-record our conversation." He told me: "I sleep with two suitcases near my bed every night. In one bag I've packed things I'll need if police come to arrest me and I have time to escape; the other's filled with some personal items if the police toss me in jail."

Axelbank's narrative also echoes Mendel's in that it shows how hollow the government's economic claims were, in fact using government sources:

If land reform aided the farmers, excessive government demands in the form of taxes have to a large extent negated these gains. At the end of 1961, for instance, the government-controlled press admitted that increased "defense" taxes on the farmer had actually lowered his standard of living to almost what it was ten years before.

.....

Last year, to help meet its defense costs, the government levied a highly unpopular 30 per cent "counterattack surtax." Formosans were irked not only because the tax hit their pocketbooks, but also because the tax was okayed by the Legislative Yuan (which passed it in ten minutes) where the number of Formosan members is about 5 per cent of the total.

Mendel points out that some work in his day showed that Taiwan did not regain the living standards it had known in the late Japanese era until the mid-1960s. Many people forget that the 1950s were not an era of export-oriented manufacturing but of an insular island economy floating on a sea of US cash, with few exports, governed by a regime that did little more than loot it. The export-oriented Taiwan Miracle really began after 1960 and especially after 1965 as Japanese and US firms invested heavily on the island.

The KMT government typically begins its economic data on Taiwan in 1950, hiding the huge economic crash that Taiwan suffered between 1945 and 1950 in the wake of war, the KMT looting of the island's assets, and the move to Taiwan of hundreds of thousands of Chinese. Most scholars follow suit, perpetuating, inadvertently for the most part, this sly bit of KMT history-construction. Today it has been forgotten how impoverished 1950s and early 1960s Taiwan really was. For the Taiwanese of that day, they were not experiencing "growth" but a decade-long recovery to return to the living standards they had known in the late Japanese period.

Axelbank ends with a long discussion of the island's future. After reviewing the potential successors to Chiang Kai-shek, he finishes with a plea to the US to encourage the regime to reform itself: disband the secret police, allow political activity, end martial law. At one point, he records:

Some Formosans, who assume that the island's political complexion will remain unchanged for the next fifteen or twenty years, foresee that the time will come when younger generation Formosans — and mainlanders who have become "Formosanized" — will live in harmony under a government run predominantly by Formosans. Other Formosans are pessimistic; they darkly envision eventual control over the island by Communist China — unless the island is soon sliced off from its present "Chinese" connections.

Today we are living through the first, and struggling to avoid the second.
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...And Hilarity Ensued: The CKS Design Contest Pwned

The Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall website at about 6 pm today. The CKS Design Competition is on the right sidebar, in glorious pink.

The Ministry of Culture really did it this week with its announcement of a CKS Design Contest (event website). The purpose of the contest -- no I'm not kidding you, please finish chewing all the food in your mouth and don't drink anything for the next minute or so -- was to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the death of Soong Mei-ling, celebrate the love that Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling had for one another, and of course, celebrate Chinese culture. This would benefit marital harmony and social education. Did I mention the $100,000 NT prize of taxpayer dollars? Yes, this is in 2013, not 1963. Hope you didn't just spew all over your keyboard.

I'm sure it is easy for you to imagine what came next as Taiwan's creative netizens swung into action to mock this incredibly silly and stupid idea. All sorts of designs alluding to Chiang's murderous ways and the dictatorship he ran, like this one above, for example, flooded the event's Facebook page, which has now been removed. The CKS Design website homepage has now been redesigned twice to eliminate items which had been spoofed by young people. Fortunately some of the originally designed website pages are here. Ben has collected some images here. I've posted another version of the original below:

The whole thing is disgusting beyond belief. Lung Ying-tai, the pro-KMT intellectual appointed to head up the Ministry of Culture, has been especially annoying as she struggled to distance herself. She said:

龍應台指出，不妥的原因是，歷史很複雜的事，如果要把那個時代非常複雜的歷史問題和責任問題，歸到說就是某一個人負責，可能太過簡單化。但那個時代的統治方法，也確實造成很多人妻離子散、家破人亡，如果沒有那樣的歷史縱深與情感在心裡，就會出問題。

...basically saying that the response to the contest was inappropriate because history is complex and to assign the blame for 2-28 to a single person is "simplistic." As Ben of Letters from Taiwan put it to me, Lung Ying-tai decided to nail her colors to the mast. The CKS design website finally announced today on the login page that the competition had been put on hold. Three days too late.

Well....

Sobering it is to contemplate how this could have happened, many people pointed out. Obviously there had to be meetings, committees, design people, and somehow... nobody pointed out how politically and historically insensitive it is to do something like this. Nobody alerted anyone to how people, especially the young, would respond. Amazing -- why do they think CKS statues vanished from public areas? Why do they think last year students at ChengChi U staged a mock funeral for Chiang Kai-shek?

As anyone who has ever worked on a government project here knows, such projects are aimed to please the people at the top, not so much to carry out their stated purpose, with everyone doing CYA all the way up, a situation innumerable department heads have complained about ("Why am I signing off on all this picayune stuff?"). But it means that people at the top must have signed off on it... and at the bottom, where there must be plenty of young people, there must have been a few subversives who gave this thing a push because they knew what would happen.

You'd think someone might have noticed, because the government similarly tried to run an essay contest a while back explaining why the ROC owned the Senkakus, which went over like a lead balloon and was widely derided (ChinaSmack).

This incident may signal how politically tone deaf and out of touch the Ma Administration is, but what this incident also shows is the long historical shadow of the cult of personality the KMT created around the dictator (my post on JE Taylor's paper) as well as the inability of the KMT to come to terms with and genuinely comprehend the enormity of its own recent past.

PS: My thanks to everyone who passed around links and images.
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Daily Links:

• Youtube link to video of my friend Cheryl Robbins and her work in Taiwan.
• Richard Matheson's interview with reality abroad, a travel website, part 2.
• Taoshan Waterfall from Steve Crook
• Jens Kastner on how the resumption of live firing exercises in Taiwan is a signal....
• China bank to buy stake in Taiwan bank
• Taipei Cycle show postmortem from Drew
• Rick Monday with The Scene, Episode 3 over at Taiwanease.com as he interviews Adam McMillan, Adrian Achermann, and Seán McCormack.
• China's historical amnesia -- this article made the rounds. It disturbs me, it suggests a kind of Othering in which They suffer from historical amnesia while We do not, given validation by the fact that it is written by a Chinese. 

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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Dachen Island Evacuation Video

A friend passed me this link. From Wiki:

Until 1955, the Dachen (Tachen) Islands were part of the Republic of China (ROC), the government of which has been based in Taiwan since the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War. As the People's Liberation Army advanced through Fujian Province in the late 1940s, the U.S.-supported Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang, retreated to China's offshore Islands. On January 20, 1955, the PLA conquest of Yijiangshan led to the First Taiwan Strait Crisis. The Formosa Resolution of 1955 passed in Congress nine days later in the United States, leading to the orderly evacuation of the Dachen Islands by the United States Navy in February. At the time, they served as the capital of the Chekiang Province. The U.S. Seventh Fleet used 132 boats and 400 aircraft to move 14,500 civilians, 10,000 Republic of China servicemen and 4,000 guerrilla fighters, along with 40,000 tons of military equipment and supplies from the island. Three days after the evacuation, the islands were taken by the People's Liberation Army. Chiang Kai-shek grudgingly allowed the island to fall to the Communists so that the other offshore island groups, Kinmen and Matsu, could be successfully defended.

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The People Hosed of Cairo

Cecilia: I just met a wonderful new man. He's fictional but you can't have everything.

President Ma Ying-jeou was at it again with the Cairo Declaration and Taiwan's status this week, another in the long line of examples of the constant KMT iteration of the falsehood that the Cairo Declaration and the Treaty of Taipei are the legal basis for the ROC claim to have "recovered" Taiwan for China. This week was especially egregious, for he added a claim about President Truman:

The 1943 Cairo Communique, worked out by the ROC president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill, said Japan should return Taiwan, Penghu and other territories in northeast China that it had “stolen” from the Chinese, Ma said.

The Potsdam Declaration of 1945 reaffirmed the Cairo Communique and gave the ROC the right to take sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu, he said.

According to Ma, in its Instrument of Surrender, Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and former US president Harry Truman also accepted the idea that sovereignty over Taiwan was settled as the US Department of State said that the US and other Allied powers accepted the exercise of Chinese authority over Formosa, which was surrendered to Chiang.

Ma's claims about Cairo are the more complex of the two sets of claims here, so we'll first look at what Truman said. Ma refers to Truman's "1950" statements in his remarks (see the Taiwan Today piece). In 1950 Truman made two major statements on the status of Formosa. Remarks about the status of Formosa are included in his famous June 27, 1950 announcement:

The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war. It has defied the orders of the Security Council of the United Nations issued to preserve international peace and security. In these circumstances the occupation of Formosa by Communist forces would be a direct threat to the security of the Pacific area and to United States forces performing their lawful and necessary functions in that area. Accordingly I have ordered the 7th Fleet to prevent any attack on Formosa. As a corollary of this action I am calling upon the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland. The 7th Fleet will see that this is done. The determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.

However, on Jan 5 of that year Truman issued a statement on the status of Formosa in which he appears to accept Chinese sovereignty over Formosa (extract here).

"A specific application of the foregoing principles is seen in the present situation with respect to Formosa. In the Joint Declaration at Cairo on December 1, 1943, the President of the United States, the British Prime Minister, and the President of China stated that it was their purpose that territories Japan had stolen from China, such as Formosa, should be restored to the Republic of China. The United States was a signatory to the Potsdam Declaration of July 26, 1945, which declared that the terms of the Cairo Declaration should be carried out. The provisions of this declaration were accepted by Japan at the time of its surrender. In keeping with these declarations, Formosa was surrendered to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, and for the past 4 years the United States and other Allied Powers have accepted the exercise of Chinese authority over the island.

"The United States has no predatory designs on Formosa, or on any other Chinese territory. The United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges, or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its Armed Forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China.

"Similarly, the United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa. In the view of the United States Government, the resources on Formosa are adequate to enable them to obtain the items which they might consider necessary for the defense of the island. The United States Government proposes to continue under existing legislative authority the present ECA program of economic assistance."

It might be possible to read: "...or on any other Chinese territory." as Truman saying Formosa is Chinese territory. To put that in its proper context, the KMT had just retreated to Taiwan in Dec and suddenly, after saying Formosa was irrelevant, the US did an about face and began to prepare a policy that shifted between saying Formosa was irrelevant and that it was important, because it did not appear that the Communist Chinese would have any trouble taking Formosa when they got around to that task -- thus the declared policy of the US was to simply let the chips fall as they may. This Time article from 1951 gives a sense of that. Hence, Truman is not saying that Formosa belongs to China. He is merely announcing that the island was not a strategic interest of the US and that there the US had no dog in that fight and no designs on any Chinese territory, however such territory may be construed.

The clear indication of the June 27th statement, however, is that the US position was that the status of Taiwan is undetermined. That has been the US position for all of recent history down to the present day.

However, let us recall some salient facts: (1) Truman can't dispose of Formosa. In 1950 the US didn't own it; Japan did. (2) The Formosans themselves weren't consulted on the issue. Lest you think that is some idealistic modern interpretation that didn't apply in those hard-nosed days, Chen and Reisman's seminal review of the issues for the Yale Law Journal in 1971 (Who Owns Taiwan: the Search for an International Title) observed of the Cairo Declaration that in its own League of Nations context:

As to environing international norms, it is sufficient to note that the doctrines of self-determination and the prohibition of use of force for territorial changes, as embodied in many resolutions of organs of the League of Nations, had transformed the component of acquiescence of the indigenous people into a peremptory aspect, and a virtual requirement of lawful transfers of territorial title. Hence, even assuming that the Cairo Declaration, as reinforced by the Potsdam Declaration, had been intended by the parties to it to create new international rights, such an intention would have been limited by international law. Jure gentium, the Cairo Declaration could mean only that the participants agreed to recognize a Chinese acquisition of Formosa if the inhabitants of Formosa indicated that they desired to be part of or to be governed by China.

In other words, Cairo, Potsdam, Truman, Mao, whatever is said and done, in the end, no legal transfer of territory can take place without the consent of the population. Even by the norms prevailing in 1943.

Shifting to the Cairo Declaration, several things may be noted. First, here is the text:

The Three Great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the first World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and The Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.

With these objects in view the three Allies, in harmony with those of the United Nations at war with Japan, will continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged operations necessary to procure the unconditional surrender of Japan.

The Cairo Declaration is not a treaty and has no force. It is merely a declaration of common aims, subject to any changes the future might bring. The language of the CD was adopted as a sop to keep Chiang Kai-shek in the war. The US clarified its position on Cairo in a statement issued Dec 27, 1950:

The Cairo Declaration of 1943 stated the purpose to restore "Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores to the Republic of China." That Declaration, like other wartime declarations such as those of Yalta and Potsdam, was in the opinion of the United States Government subject to any final peace settlement where all relevant factors should be considered. The United States cannot accept the view, apparently put forward by the Soviet government, that the views of other Allies not represented at Cairo must be wholly ignored. Also, the United States believes that declarations such as that issued at Cairo must necessarily be considered in the light of the United Nations Charter, the obligations of which prevail over any other international agreement.

That is also the UK position. George Kerr observed:

This [the Cairo Declaration] was not a carefully prepared State Paper but rather a promise to divide the spoils, dangled before the wavering Chinese. It was a declaration of intent, promising a redistribution of territories held by the Japanese. None of the territories mentioned in the document were at that moment in Allied hands.

Similarly George Kennen wrote:

No one seems to know from what deliberations this declaration [Cairo] issued; it was apparently drafted, at the moment, by Harry Hopkins, after consultation only with the President and the Chinese visitors.

I bet your head is nodding. Chen and Reisman point out two major issues, (1) the norms of the day (paragraph noted above) and (2) the capacity of the participants:

As to the capacity of the declarants, three states were simply not empowered under the principles and peremptory procedures of the Covenant of the League of Nations then in force, to decide that the territory held, and formerly recognized as validly so held by another, could now be forcibly removed from that state.

So much for Cairo. The real reason President Ma and other KMT fantasists keep referring to Cairo and to Truman and to Potsdam and the Treaty of Taipei is simple: under the postwar treaty arrangements codified in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, Japan gave up sovereignty over Taiwan and no recipient is named. Thus, under international law, the status of Taiwan is undetermined. Note that Ma generally omits discussion of the SF Peace Treaty, since to mention it instantly invalidates his case.

The purpose of this heightened exposure for Cairo and the like is simple: I believe it is the KMT plan to establish a basis for Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan without ever setting the matter before the people and legislature of Taiwan. By pretending that Taiwan has already become part of China -- and always has been, hence it was "returned" -- a 'stealth annexation' of Taiwan can be accomplished, and a plausible fait accompli offered to the world.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums! Delenda est, baby.

Paper on Parade: The Chiang Personality Cult

He looked up again at the portrait of Big Brother. The colossus that bestrode the world! The rock against which the hordes of Asia dashed themselves in vain! He thought how ten minutes ago — yes, only ten minutes — there had still been equivocation in his heart as he wondered whether the news from the front would be of victory or defeat....

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

The other day I was discussing Chiang's successful grip on power in the KMT for several decades. For me personally Chiang's ascendancy over China for so long, given that he was, by all accounts save the recent hagiography by Jay Taylor, an incompetent and a brute, has always been a bit of a mystery. Why would anyone ever follow such a person?

The answer, of course, is that people too often look at the Chiang regime and see only Chiang, whereas what they should see is regime: the structure. A key factor in authoritarian control, especially in quasi-Leninist structures as different as the Communist Party of Russia, the Nazi Party, or the KMT, are the political and social structures that compel the subject to follow along with the dominant ideology and to reproduce its discourses and understandings in his or her own thinking. The ultimate goal of any Party-State is to colonize the human mind so that active enforcement of doctrine becomes redundant: the subject identifies the forbidden as sin or thoughtcrime and so herself refrains. A trivial but good example of this form of control in current discourse is the casual way in which most Taiwanese refer to China as the mainland. By doing so, they recapitulate KMT ideology about Taiwan's relationship to China in everyday conversation, invariably without considering what they are doing. Similarly, when people refer to the Japanese occupation they recapitulate the false KMT claim that China owned Taiwan during the era of Japanese sovereignty. And what you express on the outside, you recapitulate on the inside.

How one aspect of KMT ideology was reproduced in the minds of his followers and subjects is the topic of a paper by Jeremy E. Taylor, The Production of the Chiang Kai-shek Personality Cult, 1929–1975 (China Quarterly, 2006)(not the same Taylor who produced the hagiographies of Chiang Ching-guo and Chiang Kai-shek), which offers a sketch of how the personality cult centered around Chiang Kai-shek was produced by both state and non-state actors in Taiwan society. As such, it shows how in states organized along centralized Leninist lines, the shaping of human behavior by political and social structuring is far more important in reproducing State ideology at the level of the individual than mere killing of political opponents. Nor is it merely a question of carrot and stick: Leninist (and colonial) ideological systems produce subjects who are active participants in their own oppression and the oppression of those around them.

Taylor opens with a few simple questions that the paper answers:

How and why did a personality cult develop around the figure of Chiang Kai-shek? Who was responsible for its production? And how did this cult reflect the particular circumstances in which the Nationalists found themselves in Taiwan?

The paper is concerned only with how the cult was produced and reproduced, not how it was received among the people of China and Taiwan.

Was there a personality cult? Taylor points out that it is possible to argue, given the lack of a formal bureaucratic agency dedicated to the production of a personality cult, and Chiang's repeated condemnation of personality cults in similar authoritarian societies like China and the USSR. Taylor argues, however:

Although it is true that no single agency held responsibility for encouraging veneration of Chiang, a personality cult – something that the political scientist Pao-min Chang has described as “the artificial elevation of the status and authority of one man … through the deliberate creation, projection and propagation of a godlike image”11 – did indeed exist in Taiwan in the post-war years. The many hands involved in the creation of this cult shared a common goal of raising Chiang above the level of others, and making his rule appear permanent and unalterable.

The origins of the cult lie in the Nanjing period prior to WWII, asserts Taylor. There Chiang learned to draw on Confucian ideologies of piety and respect in presenting himself, and in re-imagining himself -- I might note, a dictator who had seized power and ruled with great incompetence and savagery -- as the father of the nation and "the personification of Chinese history and culture."

It was in Nanjing that the streets were paved with Chiang: the habit of naming boulevards after major figures of the regime began, Taylor says. There too Chiang consecrated a massive Memorial Hall to Sun Yat-sen, thus annointing himself Sun's successor. Nanjing was also full of organizations that promoted Chiang....

Representative of these was the Officers’ Moral Endeavour Association (OMEA, lizhishe), an organization founded by graduates of the Whampoa Military Academy in 1929, and modelled largely on the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Although the original goals of the OMEA were to “instil an uplifting moral influence in the Huang Poo cadets [sic]”17 and provide entertainment and educational services for members of the armed forces, the Association found its calling in the production of propaganda focused on Chiang Kai-shek and his wife.

The OMEA was one of many organizations that developed in the Nanjing years and which shared a common belief in the need for a strong leader for China. Indeed, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, the use of the term lingxiu (leader/fuhrer) in reference to Chiang Kai-shek, a practice that was to become a mainstay of the Chiang cult on Taiwan, can be attributed not to Chiang himself but to followers from a group known as the Lixingshe who sought to promote loyalty to their mentor.

Chiang thus served a need. These organizations and others then engaged in mass production of Chiang imagery. An OMEA member was Chiang's personal photographer, and learned Soviet and American propaganda techniques. Wartime also provided the opportunity to use, and learn from, propaganda about the Chiangs aimed at American audiences.

After 1949 the regime relocated to Taiwan. Both techniques perfected in the Nanjing years, and new ones developed out of local ideas, were aimed at the Taiwanese. Taylor writes:

One example was the extensive use of Chiang Kai-shek’s name – Zhongzheng – in the christening of schools, parks and thoroughfares in Taiwan, usually in tandem with similar institutions named after Sun Yat-sen. This began within weeks of Taiwan’s cession to Chinese rule in 1945, marking a continuation of the efforts that had been made in Nanjing and Chongqing, so that by the time of the Nationalist government’s complete relocation to Taipei in 1949, almost every city and town in Taiwan could claim a Zhongzheng Lu (Chiang Kai-shek Road) and a Zhongshan Lu (Sun Yat-sen Road) thanks to the efforts of zealous city and county administrators.24 Similarly, other techniques first employed on the mainland were used in Taiwan in this era. Stephane Corcuff notes that the first statue of Chiang to appear in Taiwan was raised only 192 days after retrocession.25 And by the early 1950s, Chiang’s face was criss-crossing the Taiwanese countryside on the front of “propaganda trains” (xuanchuan lieche),26 just as it had done on the mainland a few years earlier.27

Although much of the statuary has thankfully vanished, the street names remain. As anyone who has traveled around Taiwan is aware, the Chiang regime also appropriated the areas of power of the previous colonial regime, the Japanese. Thus the presidential palace (zongtong fu) in Taipei, which had been built in the 1910s to house colonial government-general in Taiwan, "was officially renamed the Jieshou Tang (literally “the Hall of Chiang Kai-shek’s Longevity”) within weeks of Taiwan’s cession to Chinese rule." The KMT also brought in Taiwan-born artist to create art that celebrated The Dear Leader.

Propaganda production was disseminated by the General Political Department, one of the institutions that was set up in Taiwan to maintain the continuity of the Cult once the regime was wrenched from its home in Nanjing, much as Dracula brought crates of Transylvanian soil with him to London. The General Political Department distributed Chiang's dull announcements, and its Fine Arts Department became home for many OMEA Chiang artists. Another key department in the Chiang cult was the China Youth Corps (CYC), which fostered the Cult among the young. Taylor observes:

It even sponsored young intellectuals to travel abroad and learn leader-worship skills in other authoritarian societies. Roberto Liang (Liang Junwu), one of the most celebrated painters of Chiang Kai-shek portraits in the 1970s, had travelled to Spain in the 1960s to pursue studies with funding from the Corps. It was there that he had learnt the art of producing iconic portraits of dictators and their families, having “had the honour of painting portrait [sic] of Miss Bina Franco, the sister of Generalissimo Franco.”38

The KMT has always appropriated and reworked local Taiwan heroes and stories to legitimate its own political action, as we saw with the recent CCP-KMT lovefest in Xiamen that borrowed religious and folk ideas from Taiwan culture in the service of annexing Taiwan to China. In the Chiang Cult case, an extant leader cult, that of Koxinga, and reworked it in terms of Chiang Kai-shek's own life:

The parallels between Koxinga and Chiang (both anti-colonial heroes who had fought against “illegitimate” mainland regimes from bases on Taiwan) were stressed by the Nationalist government almost as soon as Chiang had evacuated to Taipei. Sites associated with Koxinga were restored and celebrated. By 1950, Chiang Kai-shek’s calligraphy adorned a shrine that Japanese colonizers had raised in honour of Koxinga.40 In government-sponsored publications, Koxinga’s exploits were described with reference to Nationalist-inspired vocabulary that recalled Chiang’s own campaigns: Koxinga’s victory against the Dutch East India Company being termed a “retrocession of Taiwan” (fuTai);41 his campaign against the Qing a “northern expedition” (beifa).42 Indeed, at times, the figures of Chiang and Koxinga even seem to have been deliberately conflated in official discourse. As Marshall Johnson has noted in referring to the Nationalist government’s presentation of Koxinga as a pre-incarnation” 43 of Chiang, propaganda collapsed the centuries that separated the two figures. Both were labelled “minzu yingxiong” (hero[es] of the nation) on statue-bases, for example.44

The loss of China represented a problem for the KMT, because the holy sites associated with Chiang's life had been cut off from the experience of his subjects in Taiwan. Taylor argues that the lack of the actual terrain of Chiang's life meant that a new mode veneration of Chiang emerged, one in which the man became the physical symbol and incarnation of the land itself:

Yet the constant references to Chiang as a man of alpine qualities; the propensity that photographers such as Hu Chongxian had for capturing images of Chiang in mountainous climes; and even the claim that the temporary resting site for Chiang’s body in Cihu was chosen because of its topographical similarities to his hometown in the mainland would all suggest that the links between Chiang and the mountains of Zhejiang were very much forced.47 Such associations helped reinforce the idea that Chiang was not simply the leader of China, but was himself a physical personification of the country.

Another effect of distance from China was the "historicization" (Frederic Wakeman's term) of Chiang, in which he became a figure abstracted from specific times and spaces. "By its very nature, the Chiang cult entailed an attempt to transform a living leader into an historical or quasi-mythical figure so that the transience and recentness of Chiang’s rule on Taiwan could be replaced by a facade of permanence" Taylor says.

Taylor also asks an important question in the reproduction of the Chiang Cult: to what extent was participation and reproduction enforced? In many cases, such as schoolchildren, soldiers, and prisoners, it certainly was. In other cases, Chiang fulfilled ideological needs (as we saw above). Reproduction of the Cult was also carried out by the financial and status incentives offered to local artists who created Chiang statues. Taylor describes:

Interesting insights emerge from studies conducted by Taiwanese art historians such as Zheng Shuiping, who has argued that the vast number of statues of Chiang produced during the 1950s was not the result of an enforced directive, but rather of competition amongst sculptors and designers who saw such work as a means to improve their own professional standing.55 Indeed, the production of a substantial percentage of Chiang statuary was not directly commissioned, but was tendered by way of advertisements in the Central Daily News (Zhongyang ribao); artists, as well as others such as construction companies, chose to compete against each other for government and Party contracts.56 The picture that emerges is thus one of an environment in which individuals willingly produced Chiang statuary out of professional and commercial concerns.

The Chiang cult was also distributed freelance, so to speak, by individuals who sought to acquire works of art or items that had some connection to Chiang. For individuals who wished to carve a path to high places in the Party-State, production of art or Chiang biographies was a key route to higher rank. The structure, not merely the carrot and stick, did the shaping, as Taylor notes: "The cult’s production was thus supported by a political and public culture in which participation in the Chiang cult was rewarded."

Taylor raises many questions for future research, including those of the effects of technology and Taiwan's connections with other, similar cultures, that were beyond the scope of this paper. His closing lines are a thing of beauty:

Heir to Sun Yat-sen; latter-day Koxinga; hero of the nation; leader – Chiang probably imagined himself as all these things at one time or another. Yet it was only through the imagination of others around and below him that he was able to present himself in such terms to the people of Taiwan.

In my view one of the enduring successes of the Chiang Cult -- along with the mass market advertizing and propaganda techniques his American allies used to shape Western perceptions of his place in the politics of his time -- is that Chiang is viewed with a profound double standard as somehow "less of a dictator" than his non-Asian counterparts like Hitler, Stalin, Franco, or Mussolini. Its effect is also felt today in the continual defense of Chiang by KMT loyalists, and in the need of current KMT politicians to somehow link back to the Chiang charisma -- though they usually do so by reference to Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo. The popularity of the younger Chiang is in its own way a kind of psychic compensation for the absurd and groundless veneration of the father -- Ching-kuo is the Chiang that, in today's modern Taiwan society, it is ok to admire.
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[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

Paper on Parade: From 1953 -- The Tiger at Red China's Heels

Enjoy this Saturday Evening Post article on Taiwan from 1953, back when men were men, women were women, and Taiwan was Formosa, by the famous WWII correspondent and author Robert Sherrod. I especially love its exoticizing teaser....

Chiang Kai-shek, given up by almost everyone as a sure loser three years ago, now commands a well-fed, 400,000-man army -- the largest anti-Red force in the Orient. A Post correspondent here reports on his recent interview, on the strange island of Formosa.

...On the strange island of Formosa.

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I post another gem from 1950 here.

[Taiwan]

Ma Worships at the Tomb

Kudos to AP for correctly labeling Chiang a 'dictator' as President-elect Ma Ying-jeou went to the Tomb of the Dead Dictator to pay his respects...

Taiwan's president-elect bowed in front of Chiang Kai-shek's mausoleum Saturday to commemorate the anniversary of the dictator's death, a departure from the outgoing government's efforts to distance itself from the late leader.

Ma Ying-jeou said Chiang's faults and achievements should be decided by historians - but that there was no denying he was part of the island's rich past.

Since Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo passed, the KMT has been struggling to decide who has retained the Chiang charisma. Both James Soong, now in political eclipse, and Ma Ying-jeou have attempted at times to claim they are the real inheritor of the Chiang charisma. Religious movements frequently split over whether the leader's charisma is passed down to the True Family or the True Followers -- thus we have the conflict between the Sunnis and the Shi'ites, or between the main Mormon church, run by disciples who went with Brigham Young, and the tiny Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints, run by Smith's son, and possibly, the struggles between James and Paul in early Christianity. The secession crisis is twofold, not merely a question of Who Owns the Church? but also a question how the charisma of the leader is to be institutionalized and used to legitimate the structures and individuals who carry on (see Weber).

One key component of the KMT's quasireligious structure is the Return to China theology, but another important part is the personality cult that the party fostered around Chiang Kai-shek. Jeremy Taylor¹, the Australian scholar who has written several pieces on the cult aspects of KMT rule, observes:

"In any case, while the nature of Nationalist rule under Chiang can be debated, there is little question that it shared with its Soviet and fascist contemporaries a tendency to promote the mass adoration of leaders. This included the manufacture and distribution of images of Chiang, the naming of streets in his honour, the celebration of his life through textbooks and public events; and in some cases, the attribution to Chiang of superhuman power and wisdom."

Ma, who navigates in these waters with a sure hand born of his many years as a believer himself, immediately goes to pay his respects to the cult, showing both his deference to the received religion to conservatives within the KMT, and also, representing an attempt to appropriate that cult to legitimate his own rule. Recall that Ma is widely detested, for different reasons, by KMT elites. While at the Tomb -- a shrine that institutionalizes the charisma of the Cult Leader Chiang -- Ma comments that Chiang's role will have be decided by historians -- a comment that looks balanced, but which everyone around understands is directed at Outsiders *wink wink*. We know what Ma thinks since he is there at the shrine....

UPDATE: Taiwan News has a blistering commentary on this. Here's an excerpt, but don't miss the whole thing:

Ma's action and his declaration that he will continue to visit Cixi annually on the anniversary of Chiang's death on April 5, 1975 are unmistakable signals that the president elect intends to resurrect the former virtual state religion of the Chiang personality cult that is enshrined in the Cixi facility and the even more imposing imperial temple, once known as the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, in the middle of Taipei City as well as streets and facilities all over Taiwan.

Ma stated that the judgment of history on Chiang and the autocratic rule of his son Ching-kuo, who is interred at Touliao in Taoyuan County, is "open to discussion" and maintained that his visits to the mausoleums were "individual actions" and should not be branded as an acts of "worship."

Ma thereby willfully ignores the fact that the very existence of these publicly-funded shrines marks nothing less than a campaign by the KMT to use state power to "coerce" all of the 23 million Taiwan people into "adhering" to its own Chiang cult.

Chiang's personality cult, which was launched by the KMT regime on the China mainland during its "New Life Movement" in the 1930s and imposed on Taiwan in the late 1940s, is thought by some to rival the cult of the German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler as well as the quasi worship of the Chinese Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong in the People's Republic of China after 1949.

All citizens, especially members of the KMT party, government, military, secret police and intelligence and security forces, were required to first "forever support the Leader" and, after his death in April 1975, "forever cherish the Leader," while the educational system was used to propagate Chiang's feudal-dictatorial values of obedience to patriarchal authority and Chinese national chauvinism.

¹"The production of the Chiang Kai-shek personality cult, 1929-1975", The China Quarterly, 185, March 2006, 96-110.

[Taiwan]

Waiting for Ma Dough

Xinhua reports on the upcoming verdict in the appeal of KMT Presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou's acquittal for in the embezzlement case, due out the 28th of this month. Since Ma is their fair-haired boy, naturally they are anxious -- if Ma is found guilty, he can't run for president. Hasn't made much noise though... Does anyone out there actually believe the verdict will be overturned? Color me blue on that one.

While you're contemplating the possibilities for Ma Ying-jeou, you can enjoy the squabble over the remains of dictator Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, as reported in the pro-Green Taipei Times:

The fate of the mausoleums of dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) descended into family squabbling yesterday after Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator John Chiang (蔣孝嚴), a son of Chiang Ching-kuo, said he did not support relocating the tombs to China.

"Those who don't understand Taiwanese politics should not get too involved in the issue. He or she should speak with caution," he said while visiting the mausoleums at Tzuhu (慈湖) and Touliao (頭寮) in Taoyuan County yesterday.

John Chiang was apparently referring to Chiang Fang Chih-yi (蔣方智怡), the wife of Chiang Hsiao-yung (蔣孝勇), the third son of Chiang Ching-kuo.

Chiang Fang Chih-yi said on Sunday that the family had reached a consensus on sending the remains of the two men back to their hometown in Zhejiang Province, China, consistent with Chiang Ching-kuo's wishes, rather than relocating the remains to the Wuchihshan Military Cemetery (五指山軍人公墓) in Taipei County as the family had previously requested the government do.

Despite its light-hearted moments, the tomb issue shows the way the family cult, imperial cult, and politics are intertwined in Taiwan, especially where the KMT for so many years cultivated a quasi-religious cult around Chiang Kai-shek.

Finally, KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou showed a side that so many of us have trouble getting outsiders to see: the arrogant, patronizing Ma. Feiren over at Taiwan Matters has his latest bumptiousness:

The Taiwanese blogosphere and alert readers have caught Ma Ying-jeou on camera telling a community of aboriginal squatters on the Xindian River that

"I see you as humans and as citizens of this city. I'm going to educate you well and do a good job of providing you with opportunities. That's the place from which the attitude of aborigines needs to be adjusted...now that you've come here, you need to play by the rules here..." [emphasis added]

Ma's unbelievably patronizing comments were delivered on Dec. 8th when members of the community presented a petition to Ma at the appropriately named Chiang Kai-shek (Zhongzheng) Public Housing Community. You'll have to skip ahead to about 7:20 to hear Ma making these comments. Personally, I found his comments around 6:20 where he says that "it's not that their [aborigines'] genes have a problem, their opportunities have a problem" at least as offensive. Could this finally be the beginning of the end of aboriginal support for the KMT?

Aborigines are a key constituency of the ethnic coalition that the KMT has cobbled together. It's unlikely to be the end of anything, but it would be nice if it were.

UPDATE: Prosecutors questioned Honorary Chairman Lien Chan at his office this week, ahead of the Ma verdict. The special funds cases need to have a general amnesty, and an end must be made to the special funds.

[Taiwan] [Ma Ying-jeou]

AFP Again *Sigh*

Yesterday, as I was watching the mess over at the Memorial Formerly Known as CKS Memorial on TV in the school cafeteria, I thought to myself that this was certain to trigger a flood of really bad articles in the foreign media about Taiwan. Already AFP is ahead of the curve on that one....

Note how the anti-DPP framing begins with the headline:

Taiwan leader defends move to downplay Chiang legacy

Imagine an article written about getting rid of the memorials of Soviet colonialism in Eastern Europe entitled Polish Leader defends move to downplay Communist legacy. No one would regard "downplaying" the authoritarian past as a move that required a "defense." This is just another demonstration of the double standards that infest the discourse on democratic change in this part of the world -- the world press cheered the removal of statues in Eastern Europe, but it doesn't appear able to present the same forthright position on Taiwan. Just read this BBC article on a very similar situation in Estonia, which I'll be getting back to.

From the opening frame of the article, it is very clear where the writer's sympathies lie.

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian Thursday defended a move to take the name of Chiang Kai-shek off a memorial gate, calling the late leader a "dictator" who should not be honoured.

"This is the question of whether we should worship a dictator, an authoritative ruler who had suppressed human rights, as a god or a feudal emperor," said Chen, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in a letter posted on his website.

Chiang, who died in 1975, is remembered by many as the leader who laid the foundation of Taiwan's economic prosperity and safeguarded the island from Chinese invasion.

He led the Kuomintang (KMT) party, which ruled Taiwan for 51 years until 2000 when it lost power to the DPP.

It's quite blatant here -- the accusation of being a dictator -- which is a historical fact -- is placed on the lips of the DPP President (by contrast, AFP has no trouble calling Stalin a dictator. Double standards, anyone?). The reporter then writes the counterargument from the narrator's own perspective, where it carries more weight than it would if it had been placed in the mouth of some KMT spokesperson. Note the soft language as well -- Chiang safeguarded Taiwan (that was actually the US Navy) and the KMT ruled Taiwan -- no mention of martial law in association with the KMT, never mind the political killings. The KMT argument repeated here by AFP is the functional equivalent of Russia's claim that its army saved Estonia from Nazism, and omitting mention of the Communist Party's authoritarian rule. Note below that the BBC has no trouble referring to Soviet control of Estonia as "occupation" but the parallel term martial law is AWOL in the AFP article -- with one telling exception. Because AFP omits key historical facts, no reader can understand what is going on unless they already know.

By contrast, consider the BBC article on Estonia:

The president of Estonia has signed into law a bill allowing the removal of a controversial Soviet war memorial from the centre of the capital Tallinn.

The bronze statue of a Soviet soldier, erected in 1947, is regarded by many as a symbol of Soviet occupation.

However, the large ethnic-Russian population in Estonia see it as a symbol of liberation from the Nazis.

The decision has angered Russia too. The Russian parliament is expected to adopt a statement denouncing the law.

The BBC reports the respective positions, and more importantly, who they are associated with. The AFP article does not mention that the pro-Chiang position is held largely by "ethnic" mainlanders. Imagine if AFP had written:

The large memorial in downtown Taipei, the final manifestation of the personality cult the KMT fostered around the dictator, is regarded by many as a symbol of the martial law era in Taiwan, and an anachronism in the new democratic era.

The AFP piece continues in this vein:

However, the DPP holds Chiang responsible for a February 28, 1947 massacre in which thousands of local people were killed by nationalist troops during riots.

I've highlighted the slant -- it is not history but the DPP that claims Chiang was responsible for 2-28 -- and again, no mention of martial law. Observe that so far in this article, the position held by mainstream scholars and historians is depicted as the DPP position, but the opposite position is not connected to any party. It is the position of 'many.' The reporter also softens the KMT-228 connection in another, subtle way -- while in this sentence it is the nationalist troops who do the killings, the term nationalist is never used elsewhere in the article in conjunction with the KMT.

After describing the situation, AFP then brings up the KMT -- late in the article:

The opposition KMT denounced the name change, calling it a campaign ploy by the DPP to appease supporters ahead of January parliamentary polls and a March 22 presidential vote.

"Any people with a conscience will not accept such a move. Closing the memorial hall is no different from imposing martial law to crack down on Taipei," said KMT lawmaker John Chiang, grandson of the late leader.

Finally, the term martial law appears in the piece -- and in what context? An accusation against the DPP!

Great work, AFP.

UPDATE: Enjoy this AP article, where a photo is captioned:

Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian last month pushed for the removal of late leader's name from the memorial in hopes of downplaying his legacy in Taiwan, where many remember him as a dictator during his rule.

UPDATE II: Don't miss Taiwan Echo's fantastic post at Taiwan Matters on the visual material AFP provided for this highly biased piece. There's something seriously wrong with AFP.

[Taiwan] [KMT] [DPP] [media]

Rectifying the Textbooks

Annie Huang of the AP reports on the changes in the school textbooks here. The Ministry of Education is reforming the textbooks to eliminate the problem of Chinese colonialism that continues to define so much of historical and social education here.

The announcement is the latest in a series of moves by the island in the past few months to assert its sovereignty as President Chen Shui-bian's final term in office winds down. China claims Taiwan as its own and has repeatedly threatened to attack should the island formalize its de facto independence. Beijing opposes anything that appears to give Taiwan the trappings of sovereignty.

Pan Wen-chung, an Education Ministry official, said authorities are considering dropping about 5,000 "inappropriate" references in Taiwanese textbooks to help "clear up confusion" about the island's identity.

Pan did not elaborate on the proposed changes. However, local media said the revisions would include changing "national opera" to "Chinese opera," "the Ming Dynasty" to "China's Ming Dynasty," and "this nation's historical figures" to "China's historical figures."

The textbook changes are in line with the current thinking of Chen's ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which favors Taiwanese independence and opposes identification with China, from which the island split amid civil war in 1949.

The pro-DPP Liberty Times newspaper praised the textbook initiative, saying it fit with Taiwan's effective status as an independent state.

"China is my country? And Taiwan is located off my country's southeastern coast?" it asks mockingly. "All those descriptions are obviously contrary to the facts, belittling ourselves and confusing the national identity. Yet they have long been everywhere in our textbooks."

Hilariously, the KMT argues that the DPP is engaging in "thought control." As if the current textbooks aren't engagements in "thought control."

The DPP is "seeking to impose thought control ... and distort the base of our national and cultural development," said Nationalist presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou.

Of course, no reference to name rectification -- perfectly normal in post-colonial environments -- is complete with the standard noise that it "angers China."

The move could also provoke a harsh reaction in China, which has long been sensitive to its neighbors making changes to their history textbooks. Massive protests erupted two years ago after Japan approved a new textbook that critics say whitewashes the country's wartime atrocities.

How many times have we seen the phrase "could provoke a harsh reaction from China?" A million. How many harsh reactions have we seen? That would be.....zero.

Finally, the writer gets around to explaining what the problem is:

Taiwan's school textbooks have traditionally given heavy weight to China's 5,000 years of history and works of ancient Chinese poets and philosophers, leaving little space for Taiwan's own history. The current textbooks date back to the early 1950s, after Gen. Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist forces fled the Chinese Communists' takeover of the mainland.

Oh yeah. The textbooks are totally unsuitable for a modern democratic society based in Taiwan. ESWN has a list of some of the changes culled from the local papers:

中法戰爭 Sino-Franco war -> the war between the Qing dynasty and France
日本佔據台灣 Japan occupied Taiwan -> 日本管治台灣 Japan administered Taiwan
Calendar references during Japanese rule used to be in terms of Qing Dynasty or Republic of China calendar, but they will now have to changed to either Showa (Japan) or western calendar (for example, the 20th year of the Republic of China must now be either the 5th year of Showa (Japan) or 1932).
中外遊客 tourists from inside and outside China -> 國內外遊客 tourists from inside and outside the country
國畫 national painting -> 中國山水畫 Chinese landscape painting
京劇 Beijing opera -> 中國京劇 Chinese Beijing opera
國字 national writing character -> 中國文字 Chinese writing characters
國曆 national calendar -> 陽曆 solar calendar
歷史上 in history -> 中國歷史上 in Chinese history
古人 ancient people -> 中國古人 Chinese ancient people
古代 ancient times -> 中國古代 Chinese ancient times

Those like Ma Ying-jeou who were not born in Taiwan will be hereafter referred to as 新住民 "new residents" or 中國各省隨中華民國政府遷台人士 "those people from various Chinese provinces who moved to Taiwan along with the Republic of China government."

國父孫中山先生 nation's founder Mr. Sun Yat-sen -> 孫中山先生 Mr. Sun Yat-sen
台灣地區 Taiwan area-> 台灣 Taiwan
海峽兩岸 the sides of the strait -> 兩國 the two countries
我國 our country -> 中國 China; if for example the reference is to Chinese history, culture or language (e.g. 王羲之是我國著名的書法家 Wang Xizhi is a famous calligrapher of our country -> 王羲之是中國著名的書法家 Wang Xizhi is a famous calligrapher of China)
中國 China -> 我國 our country; if, for example, the reference is to Taiwan history, culture or language
鄭成功從荷蘭人手中收復台灣，所以後人尊其為民族英雄 Kuxinga recovered Taiwan from the Dutch and therefore people honored him as a national hero afterwards -> 收復recovered and 民族英雄 national hero are controversial value judgments.

Most of the changes are reasonable and in line with changes made in places like India after the Raj, or Kenya after colonialism, or in Eastern Europe after the Russians left. Such change is normal in all other places after authoritarian and colonial regimes vanish into history and a people establishes themselves in their own land. Only here, where the former colonial party remains and seek to annex the island to the place they came from, is this viewed as strange.

The recent moves may also be viewed as another kind of statement, in addition to: "Taiwan is a nation." They also announce that the DPP is increasingly confident it will retain the Presidency in '08. An article by Max Hirsch of the Taipei Times noted last week that although the KMT remains many times richer than the DPP, the DPP has raked in more cash in the last two years. Maybe it is an anomaly, or maybe the smart money knows something....

[Taiwan] [Democracy] [DPP] [KMT] [postcolonial] [Chiang Kai-shek] [name rectification]