The Forgotten Holocaust

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, 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 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, while in Washington DC a symposium at the Brookings Institution , which will call attention to the importance of 228 in understanding present-day Taiwan.