Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan Legacy: a Dream Deferred
The Unspoken Reality
Monday July 19, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.
The past returns in mixed and varied ways. The recent Iraq war has provoked discussions on the purpose and duration of martial law. In Taiwan, the Chiang family has recently provoked discussion by requesting that Chiang Kai-shek (died 1975) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (died 1988) be formally buried at the Wuchih Mountain Military Cemetery outside of Taipei. The Chiang’s original intent had been that the two be buried in Fenghua county, Zhejiang province of China; by this request they appear to have given that hope up.
Books have and can still be written on the ambitions, goals, wealth, deeds, misdeeds and impact of the two Chiangs; a perspective, however, that has too often been overlooked is Taiwan’s long arduous path to democracy. Examine three countries post World War II.
In May 1945, Germany was a defeated country. The Allies occupied and imposed martial law upon this land of their enemies. It was a land devastated by war; a land of cities leveled by bombing, a land where industry had all but been destroyed. Famine threatened; there were trying years ahead as the country struggled to survive and build a democracy.
Under martial law imposed on it by the Allies, Germany was demilitarized and denazified. The political, legal and educational systems were reformed. War criminals were prosecuted at the Nuremberg trials (1945-9). Germany split into the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
In non-communist West Germany, democratic elections were held as early as 1949 and despite the split and the Berlin Blockade progress began. In September 1949, Konrad Adenauer of the Christian Democratic Union was elected as the first chancellor. By early 1952 the occupying army that had by then taken a constabulary role was preparing for deactivation.
In less than a decade after the war, this once Nazi fascist country had returned to a functioning democracy; it joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and began an economic miracle. The Germans with their typical hard work ethic and aided by the Marshall Plan were well on their way to building a strong country. In politics, a multi-party system that even gave participation to communists and former Nazis was in effect.
In August of 1945, Japan also was a defeated country forced to surrender unconditionally. The main occupier and enforcer of martial law from the Allies was the United States. Emperor Hirohito lost his “divinity” but was kept as a symbolic figurehead. US General Douglas MacArthur had relatively absolute power. A new constitution was drafted. War criminals were prosecuted (seven men were hung); and a period of rebuilding with a multi-party political system followed.
In this multi-party state, the first postwar election was held on April 10, 1946 for members of the Lower House of the Diet; and the second was on April 20, 1947 again for the Lower House of the Diet. By late 1955, the country had stabilized into two major political parties of the Liberal Democratic Party and the Socialists.
The San Francisco Peace Treaty (signed by 48 nations) went into effect on April 28, 1952. With it, martial law formally ended; but the United States by the treaty would retain bases in Japan and be responsible for the country’s military protection.
By the late 1950’s Japan with a multi-party democracy freed of martial law was also well on its way to creating its own economic miracle. This would be carried out by the hard work of its people with some assistance from the outside.
Taiwan after World War II was treated not as a defeated country but as a Japanese colony of 50 years. It would be taken from Japan and placed in the care of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) but its definite status was not spelled out in the subsequent San Francisco Treaty (1952).
Taiwan did sustain bombings during the war, but the destruction was no where near the scale as that of Germany or Japan. The true devastation of Taiwan ironically took place after the war as the occupying Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist army under Chiang Kai-shek took almost anything that was not nailed down to sustain their losing effort on the Mainland. It was at that time that the infamous er-er-ba (2/28) incident took place in 1947 as the people protested their unfair treatment and exploitation. It was under the guise of quelling this protest, that many of the Taiwanese intelligentsia that had experienced the development of democratic participation under the Japanese were killed off.
Martial law followed; in 1949 as Chiang Kai-shek’s army was being defeated on the mainland they had to retreat to Taiwan. Elections would begin to be held in Taiwan in the 1950’s but they would only be for bodies beneath the provincial level like county and city governments. A multi-party system was not allowed. Access to the top was denied public vote. Representatives of the top governing National Assembly (namely those in the Legislative Yuan and the Control Yuan) after having been elected on the mainland in 1947 never had to face another election until 1991. What justified this usurpation?
Taiwan achieved its own economic miracle like the Germans and the Japanese, again due to the hard work of the people and some outside assistance; but it is the area of democracy where the real scrutiny of Chiang Kai-shek and his legacy must take place.
Why were national elections delayed in Taiwan until the 1990’s when they were possible in Germany and Japan in the 1950’s? Why did martial law in Taiwan have to wait until 1987 to be lifted when it had been lifted in Germany and Japan again in the 1950’s? Why was a multi-party government with opposition parties able to be developed in Germany and Japan in the late 1940’s, when it had to wait till the late 1980’s in Taiwan? (In 1986 Taiwan’s first opposition party the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was formed but even then it was still technically not legal.)
Why were the so-called “re-united brothers on Taiwan” treated more brutally and with less respect than were the conquered enemies of Germany and Japan? Why was Taiwan’s press controlled for over 40 years by the KMT? Why did Taiwan have to suffer over 40 years of purges and White Terror after World War II with thousands (20,000—30,000 in some estimates) of Taiwanese executed on the streets and in prison when only 12 Germans were sentenced to be hung and 7 Japanese executed for war crimes? Why did the KMT as the saying goes, “have to kill nine Taiwanese to find one communist?”
Were the Taiwanese that much more vicious, more dangerous and not to be trusted with self-determination than the Nazi Germans and the militaristic Japanese?
Stability is not an excuse. All three countries had relative post war stability in which to develop their economies; in Germany as the United States faced off Russia in the Cold War the threat of instability was perhaps the greatest. Japan had the security of the United States taking over its military obligations. Taiwan had the security of the US Seventh Fleet occupying the Taiwan Strait after the Korean War started in 1950.
Chiang Kai-shek ruled with a one party state in Taiwan from 1945 to 1975 when he died; another decade would pass before martial law would be lifted and then it would only come after pressure from the outside. This is Chiang’s legacy.
Why did democracy never come under Chiang Kai-shek? The answer is simple, clear and unavoidable. The central focus of Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT was to keep one party, one privileged group and one person in power.
Some western historians have praised the accomplishment of democracy in Taiwan—that the dream finally became reality. Minimally Taiwan has at least proven that Chinese culture is not antithetical to democracy. But the only true question for democracy in Taiwan is why did it come so late?
The Republic of China founded in 1911 under Sun Yat-sen’s guidance had three key principles, min-tsu, min-ch’uan and min-sheng. Min-ch’uan--Government by the People or people’s rights; this was not intended to be rule by one party. This lesson of Chiang Kai-shek and the dictatorship of a one party state are still to be learned on the other side of the Taiwan Strait where one party controls all, facetiously “in the name of the people.”
Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan legacy is obvious, as is the reason why so many Taiwanese can never consider this man a hero. Some KMT party members still resist localization and carry this baggage. It is time to go back and read Langston Hughes’ well-known poem with its opening question, “What happens to a dream deferred?”