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1950: Chen Yi, 228 Massacre author

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On this date in 1950, Taiwan’s former nationalist governor Chen Yi was shot for a dalliance with the Reds.

A Kuomintang officer since China’s 1920s Warlord Era, Chen Yi was from 1934 Chiang Kai-shek’s governor of Fujian province — the mainland territory directly across from the island of Taiwan. Chen had the honor at the end of World War II of accepting Japan’s surrender of Taiwan — the occasion commemorated by Taiwan’s unofficial October 25 holiday, Retrocession Day. Postwar, he became governor of that island, back before it was synonymous with nationalist China itself.

His life ended in 1950, when Chiang suspected him of negotiating with the Red Chinese who had overrun the mainland. By that point, however, Chen’s political career was already history, courtesy of the most lasting of his legacies, the 228 Massacre (or more diplomatically … “Incident”).

Taiwan’s new managers — the place had been in Japanese hands since 1895 — made an immediate mess after 1945. Taiwan’s productive economy was essentially siphoned for the civil war the KMT had underway against the Communists, as well as for the venal enrichment of various well-connected mainlanders who hopped over to Formosa for plum assignments that displaced Taiwan’s own local elites.

Billowing inflation fed ethnic resentments, and the whole situation boiled over, as the name implies, on 2/28 of 1947.

On that date, frustrations boiled over* in island-wide protests that turned to riots and even took over administration of Taipei and many other cities. Chen, on whose watch the many grievances had accumulated, suppressed those with enormous violence. Chen regained control of the situation only with considerable violence: well over 10,000 are thought to have been killed in suppression during early March, many of them executed in cold blood by mainland military reinforcements.

An American who had just arrived in China from Taihoku said that troops from the mainland arrived there March 7 and indulged in three days of indiscriminate killing and looting. For a time everyone seen on the streets was shot at, homes were broken into and occupants killed. In the poorer sections the streets were said to have been littered with dead.

There were instances of beheadings and mutilation of bodies, and women were raped, the American said.

Two foreign women, who were near at Pingtung near Takao, called the actions of the Chinese soldiers there a “massacre.” … people were machine gunned. Groups were rounded up and executed.

The man who had served as the town [of Pingtung]’s spokesman was killed. His body was left for a day in a park and no one was permitted to remove it.

While effective in reasserting political power, this didn’t exactly bury the animosities between Taiwanese and mainlanders. It did put an end to Chen Yi’s governorship, however, since it was on his watch that things came to this pass in the first place. Given he then doubled as the author of the bloodbath, he assured himself a place of opprobrium in Taiwanese history.

In 1949, the Kuomintang nationalist government fled rout on the mainland and holed up on Taiwan, implementing an authoritarian state under martial law with a running “White Terror” against dissidence, often broadly conflated with communism. Until political liberalization in the late 1980s, public discussion of 228 was strictly taboo.

Today, there’s enough distance that the event is openly commemorated; indeed, Lee Teng-hui, the politician who embraced Taiwan’s democratic transition around the end of the Cold War, was himself a participant in the 228 protests. There are a variety of memorials and parks remembering 228 in present-day Taiwan … but you’d have to look very hard to find one for Chen Yi.

* The specific boiling point for the protests was a violent confrontation on February 27 when state agents had seized the unlicensed cigarettes of a local peddler. The way things were going, however, there was always going to be something like this to catalyze Taiwanese anger.

On this day..