ATTENTION: FOREIGN AFFAIRS AIDE



Dear Member of Congress:

On February 28, 2007 Taiwanese Americans will come to Washington DC to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the "2-28 Massacre." As part of the activities that will take place that day, a commemorative gathering will be held in the Rayburn Foyer during the afternoon of Wednesday February 28 and we hope you will honor us with your presence by dropping by at the Foyer between 2:45 and 3:30 that day. Please RSVP to Coen Blaauw at 202-547-3686 or coenblaauw@aol.com

I have taken the liberty of attaching a set of talking points for you to get a better understanding of the Massacre.

In the 1947 event, Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist soldiers rounded up and executed an entire generation of Taiwanese leaders, including mayors, lawyers, doctors, and students.  Scholars estimate that up to 28,000 people lost their lives in the massacre.  During the "White Terror" of the subsequent years, the Nationalists ruled Taiwan under martial law, which ended only when democratization set in during the mid-1980s.

The "228 Massacre" is an important turning point in the history of the island, and is essential in the understanding of politics in present-day Taiwan.

Sincerely yours,


[YOUR NAME]
[YOUR ADDRESS]
[YOUR PHONE NUMBER]

 

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BACKGROUND:

60th Commemoration of February 28, 1947

Sixty years ago, the "228 Incident" took place in Taiwan. It refers to the date February 28th 1947, when the arrest of a cigarette vendor in Taipei led to large-scale protests by the native Taiwanese against the corruption and repression of Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalists, who came over from China and occupied Taiwan "on behalf of the Allied Forces" after Japan's defeat in 1945.

In the following days Chiang's government secretly sent troops from China to the island. The Chinese soldiers started to round up and execute a whole generation of leading figures, students, lawyers and doctors. It is estimated that up to 28,000 people lost their lives in the turmoil. During the following four decades, the Chinese Nationalists ruled Taiwan with an iron fist under a martial law, which lasted until 1987.

Thousands of others were arrested and imprisoned in the "White Terror" campaign which took place in the following decades. Many of these remained imprisoned until the early 1980s. Until the beginning of the 1990s, the events of 1947 were a taboo subject on the island. The Kuomintang did not want to be reminded of their dark past, and the Taiwanese did not dare to speak out for fear of retribution by the KMT's secret police.

The massacre is still a defining factor in the political divide in Taiwan: native Taiwanese see it as the horrific beginning of the Kuomintang's repressive minority rule, and dominance of the political system at the expense of the Taiwanese population, which ended only with the transition to democracy under former President Lee Teng-hui in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In Taiwan, the event will be remembered through a series of commemorative gatherings.  In Washington DC, a symposium is held at the Brookings Institution, and a march for Taiwan held  which begins in Philadelphia and ends with a concluding ceremony on Capitol Hill, will call attention to the importance of 228 in understanding present-day Taiwan.

TOWARDS RECONCILIATION:

In the early 1990s, former President Lee Teng-hui set in motion a process of reconciliation: on behalf of the – Kuomintang-led – government, he extended his apologies to those who lost relatives in the massacre and initiated a system of compensation payment to families who lost members.

He also set up an Academia Sinica study commission to uncover what really happened during the 1947 events. This Commission issued a report in 1993, which concluded that up to 28,000 people lost their lives at the hand of the Chinese Nationalist soldiers. However, the Commission had not been able to examine the archives of the military and secret police agencies, which continue to be closed to researchers.

A true reconciliation on the island can only take place if the old Kuomintang acknowledges its repressive past and apologizes for the horrors perpetrated against a whole generation of Taiwanese. There is hardly a family on the island that did not lose a member in the event.

For the international community it is important to understand that the Taiwanese mistrust of Chinese intentions is not only based on ideological or political difference with China's undemocratic regime in Beijing, but deeply rooted in the anguish of a large-scale massacre followed by some 40 years of repressive rule by the Chinese Nationalists.  Through arduous democratization, the people of Taiwan freed themselves from the Nationalist Chinese dictatorship.  Now they call upon the United States and other freedom-loving nations around the world to assist them in preventing Communist Chinese from annexing Taiwan.

 

Terminology:
(KMT=Kuo-Ming-Tang 國民黨= 中國.國民黨=Chinese Nationalist Party=CNP)

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