Taiwan’s White Terror and the Search for Transitional Justice

Taiwan’s democratization was once hailed as a silent revolution. Compared to most third wave democracies, Taiwan’s democratic transition in the late 1980s and early 1990s was quite peaceful, involving little bloodshed and almost no violence. The ruling and dominant Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) ended its own authoritarian rule under the leadership of its first native Taiwanese chairperson, Lee Teng-hui, who served as Taiwan’s president between 1988 and 2000. Lee assumed the presidency after the authoritarian ruler Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, passed away and became Taiwan’s first popularly and democratically elected president in 1996.

The silent revolution has its cost, paid by the victims of the earlier “White Terror” and their family members. The seemingly smooth transition to democracy was carried out with the continuous political dominance of the KMT and that has prevented Taiwan from properly implementing transitional justice.

Anyone who visits Taiwan today can still see the grandiose Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in downtown Taipei, the capital city. Years after Taiwan became well recognized internationally as a full democracy, the government, regardless of which party is in power, still spends hundreds of thousands of dollars each year maintaining the hall. Moreover, as late as in 2015, Taiwanese would still witness democratically elected current or former KMT politicians competing to claim that they were the true political heirs to Chiang Ching-kuo. Even Lee Teng-hui, despite an unpleasant political breakup with the KMT in 2000, over the years has more than once called himself a pupil of the Chiang Ching-kuo School. When he was interviewed by Hong Kong media in early 2015, he still insisted that Taiwan would have no democracy if not for himself and Chiang Ching-kuo.

It is not surprising that people in young democracies sometimes have nostalgia for authoritarian times, but it is disheartening that affinity to authoritarian leaders is still embraced by politicians from major political parties as important assets. Such a phenomenon is a telling sign of Taiwan’s incomplete and imbalanced implementation of transitional justice.

War Experience and Taiwan’s White Terror

Post-war Taiwan’s White Terror was related to the experience of three wars: World War II, the Chinese Civil War, and the Cold War.

World War II ended in 1945 and Japan’s defeat led to the end of its half-century colonization of Taiwan. The Republic of China, established in 1911 and under the rule of the KMT, took over Taiwan. The initial excitement and enthusiasm to welcome the government from the “mother country” dissipated when native Taiwanese suffered from economic hardship and witnessed the corruption of officials. The conflicts between officials from China and the Taiwanese were exacerbated by cultural differences. Those from China thought Taiwanese were too Japanized, yet Taiwanese felt disillusioned by the behaviors of the new government.

An incident over contraband cigarettes on February 28, 1947 led to an island-wide uprising and massacre in early March. The exact number of deaths from the massacre remains unknown, and the estimates range from several hundred to more than ten thousand. To many Taiwanese, the loss of those social elites that hoped to mediate between the government and the uprising was perhaps the most heartbreaking of all. For decades discussion of the February 28 Incident and the massacre, known as “228,” was a political taboo in Taiwan, and it has a lasting political impact in Taiwan’s politics under authoritarianism as well as democracy.

The second war related to Taiwan’s White Terror was the Chinese Civil War. By a strict definition, 228 was not exactly part of the White Terror. The massacre no doubt was a demonstration of brutal state violence, but it took place before the KMT, having been defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the civil war, moved the Republic of China national government to Taiwan. The White Terror, the institutionalized and systematic use of state violence and surveillance against individual citizens that deprived them of their lives, dignities, freedoms, and rights, actually began in May 1949 when the KMT government promulgated martial law in Taiwan.

From May 1949 until July 1987, when the government finally lifted martial law, Taiwan was under authoritarian rule. During that period, individual freedom was repressed, human rights were violated, and numerous executions, arrests, and imprisonments occurred, some without public knowledge. Comprehensive political repression was carried out in the name of anti-communism because, for the KMT, the Chinese Civil War never ended. In fact, it was prolonged and merged with the Cold War.

The KMT’s anti-communist stand was aligned with the United States’ containment policy against Communist China. It was no secret that the United States supported authoritarian regimes in the third world during the Cold War. Under such circumstances, Taiwan’s White Terror between 1949 and 1987 could be roughly divided into two phases. The first, mostly in the 1940s and 1950s, aimed at eliminating members and sympathizers of the Chinese Communist Party. Most of the victims of Taiwan’s White Terror were executed or imprisoned before the 1960s began.

The second phase began roughly in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1960s the number of executions declined, but political repression of civil liberties and the authoritarian state’s penetration of society remained. By that time, a new breed of political dissenters emerged. They were not supporters of Communist China, but believers in liberal democracy. The profile of political dissenters was affected by Taiwan’s diminishing international status because Taiwan, or to be exact, the Republic of China, was no longer a member of the United Nations as of 1971. The voices calling for Taiwanese people’s right to self-rule, though at that time still feeble, were suppressed by the KMT government.

The KMT never gave up its claim, however impractical, to one day regain control of China. Advocacy for Taiwan’s self rule naturally negated the KMT’s position on retaking China. By the mid-1970s, political dissenters in Taiwan were divided into two camps, the democratic and the nationalistic. The latter experienced a shift of national identity. Early dissenters supported unification with China, but under socialism; later dissenters supported Taiwanese self-rule or eventual de jure independence from China. Since then, pro-independence forces and pro-democracy forces largely overlapped but were not necessarily or always the same. Both challenged and were crushed by the KMT’s authoritarian rule.

The last major repression before Taiwan’s democratization was the Formosa Incident in 1979. Promulgated that summer, the Formosa Magazine quickly became an important mobilizing force for the opposition movement. On the eve of Human Rights Day in December, the magazine organized a night parade in Kaohsiung, the island’s second largest city. Important political dissenters and key figures of the opposition movement made speeches regarding human rights. Conflicts between parade participants and police broke out. In the following weeks and months, speakers and organizers of the parade or key cadres of the Formosa Magazine were arrested. Some, like Lin Yi-Hsiung, a key figure of the democratic movement at that time, experienced unimaginable suffering—his mother and two young daughters were murdered and another daughter was stabbed while he was in police custody. The cases were never solved, and many believed the murderers were perpetrated by the regime. Lin’s house was under 24-hour surveillance and it was hard to imagine any killer could escape the state’s notice.

When Taiwan finally began the process of democratization in the late 1980s, the implementation of transitional justice was affected by the fact that the former authoritarian party, the KMT, along with its splinter parties, continued to dominate Taiwan’s politics. Even when the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the KMT’s major political opponent, was in power between 2000 and 2008, the KMT and its splinter parties still held the majority of seats in the parliament. Not until January 2016, nearly three decades after Taiwan’s democratization, did the KMT lose both presidential and parliamentary elections. The KMT’s loss of power led many to hope that Taiwan’s transitional justice could turn a new page.

The Imbalanced Implementation of Transitional Justice

To say that Taiwan has had no transitional justice would be unfair to the country’s experience as a democracy. The more accurate description is that Taiwan’s implementation of transitional justice has been incomplete and imbalanced. Researchers, when comparing global experiences since the 1970s, found five common mechanisms for transitional justice: trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration policies. According to the research, countries that experienced long-term authoritarian rule tend to have amnesties and seldom have trials or truth commissions. Taiwan belongs to that category. Among the five mechanisms, Taiwan has had one and half: amnesties for perpetrators and compensation, but not reparation, for victims or their family members. As for the other three, they have not been pursued. No one was brought to trial, no one was barred from serving in the democratic government, and no truth commission has ever been established.

The government made more of an effort, relatively, to heal the scar of the 228 incident than to face the damage brought by the White Terror. The government apologized for the 228 incident and offered compensation to victims or their family members, designated February 28 as a memorial day, built a monument and memorial museum for the massacre, published official reports, and included a description of the massacre in school textbooks. Many local governments also renamed parks or public spaces to memorialize the massacre and its victims. At first, the government called the money paid to the victims or their family members “compensation” instead of “reparation” because, especially in the Chinese connotation, “compensation” invokes about sympathy and consolation while “reparation” denotes responsibility. The compensation program was established in the early 1990s, but owing to continuous pressure from victims and their family members, the parliament in 2007 changed the wording in laws and regulations, replacing  “compensation” with “reparation.” 

In comparison to the 228 incident, the government did less on transitional justice regarding the White Terror between 1949 and 1987. Untangling what exactly happened and who should be responsible for what during those years would be a gigantic task, one that the government was never enthusiastic about. There was compensation, not reparations, to the victims or their family members. Monuments to memorialize the victims of the White Terror were erected in different places, and two important historical sites that used to hold trials and imprison political prisoners were converted into exhibition halls and human rights parks.

However, there is no official account or report on the White Terror. No perpetrator of the authoritarian period has ever been identified or punished because Article 9 of the National Security Law, passed right after democratization, provided blanket immunity. There is also no law requiring the removal of authoritarian symbols such as the bronze Chiang Kai-shek statutes still standing on many school campuses and in public parks. Moreover, despite many scholars’ efforts to do research on the White Terror, there are still a lot of things that remain unknown or unclear. Hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, made available by the government, are still waiting to be examined and filed since the government has not committed enough resources to go through those documents yet.

New research findings in recent years have changed the narrative about Taiwan’s White Terror. The old narratives treated all the executed and imprisoned, especially those in the 1940s and 1950s, as innocent bystanders. According to this narrative, the victims were just idealistic youths who loved to read or discuss with their peers and they became the victims of tyranny. Recent research has shown that many were actually underground members of the Communist Party of China, and they were political dissenters or even revolutionaries that dreamed about or fought for a socialist China. Such new findings brought challenges to the works of transitional justice because the KMT used to justify the executions of these people with the claim that they were communists and threatened national security. Was the KMT right and doing necessary work? Should these people be regarded as casualties of the Chinese Civil War or should they still be treated as victims of state violence?

The government’s compensation review committee tended to compensate all political victims of the 1940s and 1950s unless there was clear evidence that they were involved in possessing or using weapons against the government. If they did intend to overthrow the Republic of China government, should they or their family members be compensated by the government for the loss of their lives or their youth? Should they not, instead, go to ask compensation from the People’s Republic of China, the country that they once dreamed about or fought for?

These new research findings were complicated even more when the PRC government entered the picture. Several years ago the Chinese government unveiled a monument for those party members executed in Taiwan in the 1940s and 1950s and publicly acknowledged them as martyrs for the great socialist China.

From the transitional justice perspective, the Chinese Civil War context within which many of the executions and imprisonment took place demands Taiwanese society to reflect more deeply about the nature of state violence. The old narrative made things easier; the state definitely should not have the power to kill innocent people. However, even if these people were not all that “innocent,” under what circumstances should the state be allowed to execute people who had different political visions when the state’s power was not really threatened? Evidence has shown that more executions of the communist suspects were carried out in the mid- to late 1950s, after the KMT’s rule in Taiwan had been bolstered by U.S. security commitments.

The imbalanced implementation of transitional justice in Taiwan has propelled civil society to take up the task. Organizations of former political victims and civic associations formed to monitor the government’s policies and implementations of transitional justice. Efforts made by civil society also aimed to fill the void left by the government. The government did not establish a truth commission, so in 2007 a civic organization, the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, was established. Though it did not have the power to do what truth commissions in other countries usually do, the association has conducted hundreds of interviews of political victims and published books on Taiwan’s transitional justice experience. As no one was ever brought to trial for crimes committed under authoritarian rule, there were efforts made by civil society to challenge the legitimacy and appropriateness of the immunity clause of the National Security Law. Though no one was barred from serving in the democratic government, in recent years civic organizations have successfully blocked nominations of some constitutional court justices because of their roles during the authoritarian years.

All these efforts made by civil society are commendable, but the state’s commitment toward the realization of transitional justice is still irreplaceable.

What Lies Ahead

In her inaugural speech last May, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-Wen declared that she would establish a commission to search for truth and reconciliation and announced that her government planned to spend three years to complete a report regarding Taiwan’s transitional justice. No president before her had ever mentioned transitional justice in their inaugural speech, so many Taiwanese do expect a further realization of transitional justice.

With a DPP majority, the parliament in July enacted a law regarding the KMT’s assets and established a commission to enforce the law. The KMT’s party assets have been treated by many in Taiwan as a transitional justice issue because, under authoritarian rule, the line between KMT party assets and state property was usually blurred. Party assets have also resulted in unfair political competition because they allow the KMT to have more resources to put into political campaigns.

Another bill regarding the promotion of transitional justice that includes tasks of finding historical truth, removing authoritarian symbols, and preserving and managing political archives has also been put on the legislative agenda. The bill is expected to be enacted by the end of the year.

Looking ahead, it is hard to predict whether the immunity clause of the National Security Law will be changed and whether it is still feasible for Taiwan to have any kind of lustration policies three decades after democratization. These are all challenges to the new government as well as Taiwanese society. History will always haunt us as long as it has current relevance. How relevant Taiwan’s authoritarian past is to Taiwan’s current and future politics depends on whether Taiwanese are willing to open up and deal with some of the old wounds that are still waiting to be healed.