Taiwan marks crackdown anniversary amid China tensions

TAIPEI / AP

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen said on Tuesday the island’s democracy is mature enough to handle a thorough investigation into a bloody crackdown on anti-government protesters 70 years ago, an event seen as a rallying point by those who reject China’s claim to the self-governing island.
Tsai, speaking at a gathering in Taipei, pledged to take a “rigorous and precise attitude” in the assigning of responsibility for the violent suppression of the protests that began on Feb. 28, 1947. The largely peaceful opposition movement was directed at the corrupt rule of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalist Party that had taken control of the former Japanese colony less than two years earlier. Tsai had said during her inauguration last May that she expected within three years to see a full report on the suppression of the protests.
China considers the uprising a part of the overall struggle that led to the Communist victory in 1949, while many Taiwanese see it as a backlash against attempts to govern the island from China without the consent of the island’s native population.
“After 70 years, I believe that Taiwanese society now has the mature democratic mechanisms to discuss this matter,” Tsai told a gathering of victims, families and supporters in 228 Peace Memorial Park in central Taipei, named after the date of the uprising.
As many as 28,000 people were believed killed after Chiang dispatched troops to massacre participants in the largely peaceful protests, many of whom came from the Japanese-educated elite. Many more were imprisoned and killed in the decades of political persecution that followed, in what was widely known as the “White Terror.” Suppressed under Nationalist rule, the uprising has become a rallying point for Taiwanese who say the island and China are separate nations. Opponents, including those in China, say the anniversary is being used for political purposes to further an anti-Beijing, pro-Taiwan independence agenda.