Taiwan’s past injustices and authoritarianism still casting a shadow

Bayonets fixed, the sentries marched slowly, the left arm extended with a white-gloved fist clenched each time the right knee rose and the clanking of their boots echoed around the giant marble hall. We were in the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei City where a bronze, seated statue of the generalissimo looks down on the changing of the guard every hour between 9am and 5pm.

Opened in 1980, five years after Chiang’s death at 89, the hall stands at one end of a 250,000sq m park, with Taiwan’s National Theatre and National Concert Hall at the other. The concert hall has a large, reflective glass window, in front of which about 30 people were practising dance moves while in the park below a group of Pokémon players were gathered around a steel pole.

Earlier that day Wang Bao-hsuan, a candidate for the small New Power Party in Saturday’s legislative elections, was complaining to me about the changing of the guard in the memorial hall. “It’s annoying. I mean, why? He’s dead,” she said. “Okay, he’s a controversial guy. For some people he’s just an evil guy. I would not use this strong word but if it’s so controversial, why use the money to worship him every day?”

A centre-left party that backs Taiwanese independence, the New Power Party wants to abolish the death penalty and to legalise voluntary euthanasia. It has suffered numerous splits and defections in recent years, and is battling to stay above the 5 per cent threshold for remaining in the legislature.

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Although her party backs President Tsai Ing-wen’s Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) tough stance towards Beijing, Wang says that the government has failed to fulfil its promise to deal with Taiwan’s past.

“I get really angry at our government now because eight years ago that’s the main claim they were going to do when they got into power. They were going to deal with the past injustice, the past authoritarianism,” she said. “They did half of it, but they just don’t want to touch the really controversial part. They don’t even want to open communication about it, especially in terms of the so-called perpetrators. Who are perpetrators or not perpetrators? Or maybe the system that produced perpetrators. They don’t really want to talk about it.”

When Chiang retreated to Taiwan from mainland China with his nationalist army after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949, he put the island under martial law. Communists and those accused of associating with them were purged, persecuted, jailed, tortured, disappeared and sometimes executed. Under the so-called White Terror, which lasted for decades, secret police targeted activists, driving much of civil society underground into groups that later helped to create the DPP ahead of the move to democracy at the end of the 1980s.

“They did a lot about helping victims and they opened a lot of files to let people understand the past for research. But they don’t really want to talk about the system that produces such bad histories,” Wang said.

Wang’s PhD at the University of Essex was on transitional justice, which seeks to use legal redress to respond to human rights abuses and offer recognition to victims. She would like to see a process like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) but fears it is too late for Taiwan.

“I would love if Taiwan can have the kind of mechanism of the TRC in South Africa. I think what’s the most valuable thing about TRC in South Africa is it was broadcast to everyone in the world. I think that’s something really special. What happened in Taiwan, to be honest, I think the worst thing is people don’t really want to talk about it. And so we don’t have enough social communication about what happened in the past,” she said.

If it is too late for a reconciliation process and perhaps for prosecutions, Wang would like Taiwan to introduce a lustration law that could remove officials from office if they were associated with abuses by the state.

“That’s something that can turn Taiwan into a real democratic country. Even if we couldn’t really get many people punished under this lustration law we still have to have it. But the government don’t want to do it. This is the part they really don’t want to punish,” she said. “Do you know why that’s very interesting? Because under the authoritarian regime they use a lot of people to watch their enemy. The only people they could use to watch the enemy usually were closer to those people. That’s why they don’t want to touch it.”