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dear alan,
Having not seen the BBC documentary to which you refer, it's hard to
know how much of the recent history of Taiwan is covered. Your quotation
seems to imply - pardon me if my presumption is incorrect - substantive
continuity between the actions of the Chiang Kai-shek Kuomintang dictatorship
in the suppression of the February 28, 1947 revolt against the KMT (in
which over 20,000 Taiwanese were killed) and the White Terror, and 38 years
of martial law (from 1949-87) and the current government of Taiwan. Attempts
to draw comparisions with Taiwan's "2-28 Incident' and White Terror with
Cuba would scored propaganda points for the left during the Cold War period,
but that kind of parallel is no longer valid.
Indeed, the current reality is quite the opposite
as Taiwan's current government is rather more similar to a ``center-left``
or ``third way`` administration . After decades of struggle for democratization
(which induced moves by the KMT to liberalize the political system), the
opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won Taiwan's second direct
presidential election in March 2000 under its presidential candidate Chen
Shui-bian, thus ousting the KMT. The DPP, whose establishment in September
1986 defied martial law restrictions, is the direct descendent of the grassroots
opposition movement against the KMT and represents the victims -- not the
executioners - of the white terror. Chen got his start in politics as one
of the defense lawyers for eight opposition activists charged with sedition
(which carried a possible death sentence) in the December 1979 "Formosa"
case, in which the KMT cracked down on an opposition effort to form an
opposition party in substance. He also served several months as a political
prisoner in the 1980s. Vice President Annette Lu Hsiu-lien was one of the
"Formosa Eight" and served eight years of a 12-year sentence before being
released after an international campaign. Taiwan is far from perfect, especially
given the difficulty of correcting the political, economic, social and
cultural problems left from nearly 55 years of KMT rule, but now has a
fully elected government (which, despite the deficiences of bourgeois democracy
is a far cry better than a fascist dictatorship), no political prisoners,
vibrant environmental and labor movements and probably the freest - indeed
licentious - media in East Asia at present. The DPP's victory in March
2000 also had historic significance by ending the rule of the last right-wing
regime left from the World War II period. Despite the links between
Washington and the KMT regime during the Cold War period, the polarities
have changed - Taiwan's government is no longer a rabidly ``anti-communist``
regime but is rather more similar in character to the social democratic
``centre-left`` governments that emerged in Spain, Portugal and Greece
after similar transitions.
Taiwan's main problems include the continued influence
of the KMT, which has a majority in the national legislature (but will
probably lose it in the next set of legislative elections in December,
which will be the first ever conducted under a completely level playing
field), intense pressure from the People's Republic of China (PRC), which
is overtly hostile to Taiwan's democraticization and the DPP government
and the inability of the world community to officially accept that Taiwan's
domestic political development has rendered obsolete the confines of the
1946-49 Chinese civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and
Chiang's KMT, or in other words, that the people of Taiwan ``have recovered``
Taiwan from the exterally imposed KMT regime. The most explosive
issue is Beijing's continued effort to compel Taiwan to "unify" with the
PRC regardless of what the people in Taiwan desire. This pressure
has included the direct ``test firing`` of surface-to-surface missiles
near Taiwan's two major international ports and over Taiwan in March 1996,
shortly before the island's first presidential election. The "Communist"
government of the PRC continues to claim that Taiwan is PRC territory,
a claim that rests on a very convulted interpretation of history.
Nevertheless, Chen and the DPP have repeatedly affirmed their desire for
peaceful and friendly relations with Beijing -- in rather sharp contrast
to the KMT's past call for ``to recover the mainland,`` calls that have
failed to elict any goodwill in response nor any indication that Beijing
will drop its expressed willingness to use force against Taiwan to secure
"unification". Those with a sense of history will note the parallels with
Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. The issue facing the international left is
where its key values lie - on the side of a genuine (and for a rarity,
successful) popular struggle against one of the world's longest living
authoritarian regimes or on the side of an anti-democratic government whose
core values are evidently more feudalist and national chauvinist than anything
that could remotely be considered socialist.
By the way, the suppression of the democratic movement in the PRC at
Tiananmen Square witnessed on CNN was merely the tip of that particular
iceberg, but that's an issue that those more conversent in PRC affairs
should respond to.
Dennis Engbarth
freelance journalist,
Taipei Taiwan
Alan Spector ¼g¹D¡G
Note from Alan Spector: The
following excerpt is from a British Broadcasting Company (BBC) project
on the history of Taiwan. I found it interesting, because in all the debates
over the various repressive measures taken by capitalist and socialist
regimes, there is an overwhelming tendency to minimize or completely cover
up massacres by capitalist regimes which are labeled "democratic" while
roften inflating statistics on the deaths caused by socialist regimes.
For example, Cuba is continually referred to as a regime which "violates
human rights" and the U.S./British media continues to focus on the deaths
of perhaps 1,000 people during the Tienamein Square protests. In the past,
we have mentioned obvious incidents, such as the anti-communist repression
in El Salvador and Guatemala which killed perhaps 180,000 people, the U.S.
organized fascist coup in Chile which killed tens of thousands, and the
U.S. organized fascist coup in Indonesia that killed perhaps 500,000!
Here is another story. Considering the relatively small population of Taiwan
at the time, a "massacre of perhaps 18,000-30.000 " people makes any discussion
of Castro's Cuba, or even gangster Milosevic's Yugoslavia look pale by
comparison. But yet the drumbeat goes on about how "capitalism" is "inherently
more favorable to human rights.....etc. etc." I'm sure there are
dozens more countries where situations like this happened, in addition,
of course to the other unnecessary deaths from things like measles (40,000
in Ethiopia alone), malaria, cholera, AIDS, etc. etc. These situations
should be discussed more actively in courses we teach.============================================================================http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/asia_pacific/2000/taiwan_elections2000/1945_1949.stm With
the end of World War II Taiwan was handed over to the control of mainland
China, under the Kuomintang (nationalist) government of General Chiang
Kai-shek. The move brought to an end more than 50 years of Japanese control.
Chiang moved quickly to formalise the island's status
as a province of China. On Taiwan itself liberation from Japanese rule
was initially welcomed, but many quickly came to resent the corruption
of the new government and what was seen as the exploitation of Taiwanese
resources for mainland post-war reconstruction. Taiwanese industry, which
had been closely tied to Japan, was redirected to supply the needs of the
mainland and the island's economy slid into crisis. Unemployment soared
and, as protests grew, a brutal crackdown took place in 1947.
In what became known as "the White Terror" an estimated
18,000 - 30,000 members of the island's native-born political and academic
elite were executed as Chiang's government asserted its control. For decades
afterwards the government insisted the action was a crackdown on communists
and gangsters.
As the war with the Japanese came to an end, on
the mainland the civil war with Mao Zedong's communist forces resumed more
fiercely than ever with the communists increasingly gaining the upper hand.
As defeat loomed hundreds of thousands of Chiang's soldiers defected to
the communist side. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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