The 228 Incident – The Uprising that Changed Taiwan’s History

 

Instead, the investigators bumped into a street vendor, a forty-year-old widow. The officials, believing that the woman was selling contraband goods, confiscated the cigarettes. She resisted. “If you confiscate everything,” she said, “I will not be able to eat. At least let me have my money and the cigarettes provided by the Monopoly Bureau.”

 

This episode led to violent protests, which the understaffed Taipei police forces were unable to handle. While the Japanese had 208,480 military and police personnel, in 1947 the Nationalist government had only around 10,000 police officers on the whole island (see: Tse-Han Lai / Ramon H. Myers / O. Wei: A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28, 1947 , 1991, p. 89). On 28 February 1947, the police tried to suppress the revolt and fired in the crowd, killing several people. 

The protests turned into a popular uprising that channeled the dissatisfaction of many Taiwanese people with the corruption, inefficiency and arrogance of the Guomindang administration. On March 7 (other sources say March 9), Nationalist troops landed in Keelung (Jilong). They brutally suppressed the uprising and killed thousands of people. An American reporter in Nanjing, then capital of the ROC, related eyewitnesses’ accounts of the massacre.

An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku [Taipei] said that troops from the mainland arrived there March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead. There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped, the American said. Two foreign women, who were near at Pingtung near Takao [Kaohsiung], called the actions of the Chinese soldiers there a “massacre.”

They said unarmed Formosans [Taiwanese] took over the administration of the town peacefully on March 4 and used the local radio station to caution against violence.Chinese were well received and invited to lunch with the Formosan leaders.Later a bigger group of soldiers came and launched a sweep through the streets. The people were machine gunned. Groups were rounded up and executed. The man who had served as the town’s spokesman was killed. His body was left for a day in a park and no one was permitted to remove it.

In a speech made on March 10, China’s leader Chiang Kai-shek defended the government’s decision to put down what he described as a “disturbance” caused by “evil persons” and by a “Japanese-style deceit”:

Since our recovery of Taiwan last year, the central government regarded the state of the harmony and order in Taiwan as very satisfactory, and we did not send troops to be stationed there … [The] spirit of patriotism and self- respect [of the Taiwanese] is no different from that of the Chinese people in other provinces. Recently, however, some people formerly mobilized by the Japanese and sent to the Southeast Asian theater to fight–and some Communists among them–took advantage of the Monopoly Bureau’s smuggling case to promote their own ends and create a disturbance.

[On] March 7, the so-called February 28th Incident Resolution Committee unexpectedly made some irrational demands. That committee demanded that the government abolish the Taiwan Garrison Command Headquarters, that the Nationalist forces surrender their weapons, and that all security organs and the army and navy be staffed only with Taiwanese. These demands go beyond the jurisdiction of the local administration, and the central government cannot accept them. Moreover, yesterday many people illegally attacked government administrative organs.

Because these incidents have repeatedly happened, the central government has decided to dispatch a military force to Taiwan to maintain security. It has been reported that a military force already has safely landed in Keelung and that harmony has been restored.

 

Aware of the disastrous military prospects of his government, Chiang Kai-shek began to plan a strategic retreat to Taiwan, which was slowly built up as a future base for the reconquest of the Chinese mainland. By early 1949, 300,000 loyal troops had been transferred to the island.

Furthermore, art collections from Beijing’s Imperial Palace as well as the city’s archives were shipped to Taiwan, in a propagandistic move aimed at portraying the Guomindang government as the custodian of Chinese cultural heritage (Jonathan D. Spence: The Search for Modern China, 1999, p. 485).

Faced with the prospect of a complete collapse of the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek was unwilling to implement the democratic reforms enshrined in the Constitution. He regarded order and stability as the absolute priority, and he feared traitors, deserters and defectors.

In May 1949 Chiang proclaimed martial law, which was the basis for the stifling of all real and alleged anti-Guomindang activities. During the era of repression known as the White Terror, an estimated 4,000 people were executed and 140,000 people were imprisoned (J. Bruce Jacobs: Democratizing Taiwan, pp. 34-35).

 

Sun Liren (孫立人), known as the “Rommel of the East”, had distinguished himself as a general during the Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War against the Communists. In 1950 he was named Commander in Chief of the Republic of China Army. However, this was just a prestige title without real power, for Chiang had grown suspicious of his general, whom he considered too independent and potentially disloyal. An investigation against Sun was launched, and he was found guilty of plotting a conspiracy. In 1955 he was put under house arrest. He was released only thirty-three years later and died in Taichung in 1990.

Controversially, in 2011 Ma Ying-jeou‘s Guomindang government rehabilitated Sun and made his former residence a museum.

Many innocent people, who had never been interested in politics, also became victims of the White Terror. For instance, Ke Shiyuan, grandfather of current Taipei mayor Ke Wenzhe, was imprisoned by the Guomindang without official charges and trial.

During Taiwan’s martial law era, the Guomindang dictatorship did not allow the facts of the 228 incident to be discussed publicly. For decades, the victims were forgotten, their families could only grieve in private. In many respects, the 228 incident was for Taiwan what the Tiananmen Square protests are nowadays for China. It was only after Taiwan’s democratization that those events started to re-emerge in the collective memory.