A government crackdown on a protest movement. An attempt to exterminate the intelligentsia and all potential revolutionaries. On an island the size of New Jersey, somewhere between 18,000 and 26,000 people dead or missing--no one knows the real figures. The largest peacetime massacre ever. Maybe it wasn't terribly "significant" in the course of world history--who cares what happens on a remote island in the South Pacific? Maybe it just wasn't as prominent as the violent events of the Cultural Revolution or Tiananmen Square. For whatever reasons, few Americans seem to know or care about the events that surrounded this terrible incident in Taiwan. But for the Taiwanese people, February 28 will always carry an added significance.
This February 28 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Taiwan's "2-28" massacre. Fifty years ago, following World War II, the Allies freed Taiwan from Japanese control and turned the island over to China. After a half-century of Japanese military occupation, the Taiwanese people were relieved to be reunited with China; they faced the possibility of self-determination with high hopes.
What they found, however, was an authoritarian Chinese regime dominated by the mainland Kuomingtang Nationalist Party, typically portrayed by American history books as the "good guys" who lost to Mao. In reality, the Kuomingtang was corrupt and autocratic. Taiwan was "rescued" from the Japanese invaders only to find itself under new Chinese oppressors. The official language changed from Japanese to Mandarin Chinese, the language of the mainland. People were forbidden to speak their native Taiwanese Amoy dialect in public.
Anger mounted against the new mainland regime and, finally, exploded. The last straw came on February 28, 1947, when Monopoly Bureau agents beat a woman who was selling cigarettes on the black market, shooting a man who attempted to come to her rescue. Outraged by the flagrant brutality of the police, the Taiwanese people rioted and rebellions erupted across the island. The government declared martial law, and secret reinforcements came in from the Chinese military. The Nationalist government opened war on the protesters and began to systematically execute intellectual leaders capable of organizing a Taiwanese resistance movement. An estimated 20,000 people fell victim to the government's rampage. The massacre came to be known as the 2-28 incident, named after the day on which it began.
This year, for the first time, the Taiwanese government will commemorate the deaths by declaring 2-28 a national holiday. Looking back, the days of martial law imposed from the mainland seem far away. Today, Taiwan has a thriving economy with a booming growth rate: around nine percent for the past three decades. Within the last decade, Taiwan has become a multiparty democracy. And although it is still dominated by the Kuomingtang, many argue that Taiwan is independent in all but name.
But unfortunately for Taiwan, names matter. By and large, Taiwan is still not recognized as an independent nation. In 1971, at China's insistence, Taiwan was evicted from the United Nations and the World Bank; to this day, Taiwan has no representatives in either organization and no official diplomatic ties to the US. Even President Li Teng-hui's 1995 visit to his American alma mater, Cornell University, touched off threats from the Chinese government, which began missile testing near Taiwanese waters.
Chinese-Taiwanese hostility came to a head last March during Taiwan's first ever direct presidential election. China began military exercises near Taiwan, obviously attempting to disrupt the election and intimidate voters from electing the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party candidates. US military support was critical in affirming Taiwan's new steps toward democracy and sending a strong message about the American commitment to stopping Chinese intimidation.
America's support, however, should not emerge only during moments of crisis. If the US claims to be committed to supporting democracy, self-determination, and free markets in Asia, it has no excuse for its failure to fully support the Taiwanese independence movement. Indeed, the international community's refusal to recognize Taiwanese independence carries ramifications that extend beyond Taiwan's situation. Taiwan's independence movement is about as legitimate as it gets: it is a free-market, democratic nation seeking independence from its long history of colonization by a hostile Chinese autocracy.
In the terms of the West's political rhetoric, it simply doesn't get more clear cut than that. The US failure to recognize Taiwan as a legitimate political entity speaks volumes about its failure to put principles over politics. And it casts more than a shadow of doubt over America's ostensible motives in East Asia. Having gone to war in Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines--supposedly to free them from colonialism or the "evils of communism"--the US has to either support Taiwan or revise its story.
The blame, however, cannot fall entirely on American shoulders. Perhaps because of Chinese intimidation and lack of international support for Taiwanese independence, Taiwan's government still officially supports the idea that Taiwan is part of China. In recent months, since American intervention to support the Taiwanese presidential elections, Taiwan has been much bolder about its claims to independence. But the tragic reality remains: Taiwan cannot gain independence without international support--support that would come with the political risk of alienating China. And after the recent death of Deng Xiaoping, the succession struggle will force China's leaders to be even more nationalistic and belligerent than usual to gain support.
Now, more than ever, Taiwan needs international backing. Its fate lies in the hands of an international community that supports self-determination and democracy only in name. This February, as the Taiwanese people commemorate the deaths of their countrymen, 2-28 remains a reminder of the continuing struggle to turn the empty rhetoric of the international community into a political reality.