Who ordered the deaths of 18-28,000 civilians in Taiwan and why did this happen?
Taiwan has always been an island with its own people who had their own traditions, culture and customs. Migrants from China, Japan and the Ryukyu Islands all led to communities here and there on the island and a flurry of European colonists also sought to make the ‘Beautiful Island’ (Ilha Formosa) their own. However, it was not until 1895 and the colonization by the Japanese that all of the Taiwanese people were brought securely under the heel of a foreign power. The Japanese colonization was hated but lasted until the end of the Second World War, when a treaty gave the island to mainland China, to which (although this is an issue that is contested) it had never previously been formally connected. The Japanese may have been hated but they hugely improved the economy of the island, albeit as a colonial economy, through having built transportation and economic infrastructure.
On the mainland, the surrender of the Japanese merely removed one party from the three-faction war which then resolved itself into a Civil War between the Chinese Communist Party which eventually came under the control of Mao Zedong and the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai Shek. The latter was eventually to be defeated in 1949 and fled to Taiwan to establish a new independent government there. However, Maoist tactics were to hold the countryside and mobilize the peasantry as the vanguard of the revolution – which meant that the coastal regions remained under Nationalist control. From 1945, then, Chiang Kai-Shek dispatched troops to Taiwan to take it under Nationalist control and keep order.
The troops that were sent to the island were poorly-trained and disciplined and had few orders rather than to keep things under control. Japanese institutions were retained and the only difference to the lives of the Taiwanese was that mainland Chinese now occupied the roles that Japanese had once held. Corruption and unhappiness were rife.
On the last day of February, 1947, an elderly woman was arrested and beaten publicly for selling untaxed cigarettes. A group of angry Taiwanese soon surrounded the Chinese troops responsible and protested. A man was shot. Pandemonium broke out Riots soon raged against the land and thousands were killed – no one knows how many were killed but estimates range between 18-28,000 people. Years of abuse, appropriation of property, profiteering and exploitation had brought the indigenous Taiwanese people to a state of raging indignation. They suffered greatly because of it. Soldiers gunned down thousands of unarmed civilians.
Two years later, Chiang Kai-Shek landed in Taiwan and assumed a position as head of government. Very little investigation into what had caused the massacre had been conducted and the Nationalist government preferred it that way, sweeping under the carpet even any mention of the events. This policy was so successful that, today, most Taiwanese have little knowledge of what happened or why – only those few older Taiwanese keeping alive the memory of those they lost and hoping that, one day, justice might be granted to them.
John Walsh, Shinawatra University, March 2007
