Bad Elements

by Ian Buruma

  I met one old dissident in Taipei who used a metaphor to explain what it had been like to grow up in the shadow of 2-28. A woman he knew had joined a religious cult. She was seduced by the cult leader. The woman’s young daughter soon noticed what was going on. When the cult leader realized this, he told the little girl that she had seen nothing. She was forced to blot it from her memory, or otherwise terrible things would happen. “I later met this girl,” the dissident said, “and she was pretty messed up.”

  When I first visited Taiwan, in 1982, the symbols of the KMT were everywhere: the yellow maps of One China, the busts of Sun Yat-sen, founder of the KMT, of Chiang Kai-shek, looking stern and patriarchal, and the admonishment, written on posters and scrolls, never to forget the motherland, harking back to Ming-dynasty loyalists who hoped to reclaim China from the Manchu invaders in the seventeenth century. Every train station, school, and public building displayed them. By the mid-1990s, however, when former dissidents were serving as DPP legislators or city mayors, most of the busts of Chiang had disappeared. I wondered what had happened to the thousands of stony heads of the Gimmo. Had they been pulverized, or was there some giant vault somewhere containing the detritus of KMT dreams, or a dumping ground, perhaps, like the one in Delhi where statues of British viceroys gather dust?

  A large avenue in Taipei that used to be named after Chiang Kai-shek now bears the name of an aboriginal tribe (after a suggestion to call it Marilyn Monroe Avenue had been rejected). And in the center of town is 2-28 Park. In the middle of the park is a new memorial, a kind of pagoda done up in black granite, set in a pool of water. Near the memorial is the 2-28 Museum, housed in a biscuit-colored colonial-style building that used to be a propaganda broadcasting station, first for the Japanese and later the KMT, and was the first building taken over by the Taiwanese rebels in 1947. In front of the museum is an abstract modern sculpture, a line of large stone blocks. The precise meaning of this composition escaped me, but the title read THE SOUL OF TAIWAN.

  The museum is a shrine to the 2-28 Incident, containing blurred, blown-up photographs of the martyrs—doctors and students and intellectuals, some of them dressed in formal Japanese kimonos, others in neat linen suits—together with historical documents, and various relics: fans, letters, eyeglasses, guns, pamphlets, pens, radio sets, and threadbare clothes. Displayed in one glass case is a black Japanese-style student uniform with brass buttons on a torn jacket encrusted with dark stains. It had once belonged to a provincial student, who found himself stranded in Taipei when rail services were suspended after the events of February 28. He had entered the Railway Administration Building with other students, to inquire when services would resume. It was the last time they were seen alive. All students were suspect: the railway director’s private guards murdered them in a matter of minutes.

  As told in the museum, the story of Taiwan, including the 2-28 Incident, is as formulaic in its way as the old KMT myth of Nationalist martyrdom. A short historical overview explains how the Taiwanese—that is to say the Chinese who arrived in Taiwan three centuries ago—were always oppressed by foreign conquerors: first the Dutch, then the Portuguese, the Japanese, and finally the KMT mainlanders. This, one is told, fostered a unique love of freedom and a rebellious spirit. But the story had a typically Taiwanese post-colonial twist. Hindsight has given Taiwanese a rosier view of Japanese rule, which, though harsh, also brought many benefits, such as universities, science, railways, and electrification. The KMT, on the other hand, brought only violence, poverty, and corruption. The loathing of aliens that once bound Han Chinese together against the Manchu invaders is replicated in the Taiwanese hatred of mainland Chinese.

  The story of 2-28 itself, as described in books, comics, videotapes, photographs, prints, posters, and textbooks, invariably goes like this: On February 27 agents of the Monopoly Bureau, who were little more than mobsters on the government payroll, assaulted an old lady who was peddling cigarettes in Taipei. One of the agents beat her over the head with his pistol. Crowds gathered to protest. The agents, panicking perhaps, began to shoot and killed one of the demonstrators. More people were gunned down the next day, with internationally outlawed dumdum bullets, which rip the body open. The rebellion spread all over the island. Radio stations and government offices were taken over. People suspected of being mainlanders, in or out of uniform, were attacked and sometimes clubbed to death with sticks.

  In 1947, Taiwan was a province of China, which was still ruled by the KMT. A meeting was convened between Chen Yi, the KMT provincial governor, a brute with Shanghai gangster connections, and members of the Taiwanese elite. Civil liberties were promised in exchange for a return to law and order. But as soon as more KMT troops arrived from China, the “white terror” began: Martial law was declared and mass arrests, torture, rapes, disappearances, and executions followed. Within about two months, much of the native Taiwanese intelligentsia was wiped out. Many people were so badly tortured that they had to be carried to the execution grounds. Eventually, after he had lost the civil war in China and retreated to Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek made a gesture to appease outraged Taiwanese feelings: In 1950, after a splendid fireworks display, Chiang’s old friend Chen Yi was executed for being a “traitor.”

  As I wandered outside the museum, past the granite blocks expressing the “Soul of Taiwan” and the young people posing for pictures in front of the 2-28 Memorial, I thought about the melancholy fact that the foundation of modern nations is almost always soaked in blood. There is a strong nineteenth-century whiff about the Taiwanese story, an air of neighing horses, heroic martyrdom, and fine Enlightenment ideals of freedom, national independence, and democracy. The same ideals had also been aired in China at various stages of its modern history, yet they had failed to take root. Why had they succeeded in Taiwan? What was it about Taiwanese nationalism that brought freedom and democracy, while Chinese nationalism resulted in tyrannies on the mainland and in the Chinese Republic on Taiwan?

  I was struck by an odd wooden sign, written in Chinese, near the 2-28 Museum: ROAD TO HEALTH. Behind the sign ran a narrow, ten-meter strip made up of small, black sharp-edged pebbles, stuck vertically in the surface, rather like a fakir’s bed of nails. Next to the strip was a pair of Nike running shoes, placed neatly together, with a pair of white socks tucked inside. And there, on the pebbled Road to Health, was a young man with a crew cut, walking slowly up and down in his bare feet, his back straight, his arms swinging like a soldier’s, his face a picture of forbearance. Up and down he went, along the stony road leading to the 2-28 Museum, up and down, up and down.

  Almost every Taiwanese over a certain age has a personal 2-28 story to tell, a remembered fragment of the bloody national myth. “Mark” Chen Tan-sun remembers the murder of a respected local doctor who lived in a small town near Chen’s home when Chen was twelve years old. The doctor, having protested against a venal and incompetent KMT mayor, was dragged behind a car to the county capital; there, he was made to kneel, and his brains were blown out. Chen can remember listening to rebel radio broadcasts inciting Taiwanese—in Japanese, the lingua franca that mainlanders did not share—to rise up against the KMT. He remembers the excitement. But he also remembers the fear that came afterward, when friends and relatives began to disappear.

  I met Chen for the first time on election night in 1996, and saw him again three years later. Like Ben Wei, he had returned in 1994, after nineteen years of exile in the United States. Now he was magistrate (or mayor) of Tainan County, near the village where he was born, one and a half hours by train from Kaohsiung. To get there you pass through some of the ugliest industrial landscape on the island: drab cement works, steel plants emitting green and yellow smoke, and small factories in rinky-dink buildings of corrugated iron. Squat concrete apartment buildings rise out of flat, emerald rice paddies, lined with dusty palm trees. Billboards advertising yet-to-be-developed real estate—high-rise buildings with Spanish-style balconies and phony Chinese roofs—promise a future of opulence a
nd ease.

  Mark Chen spoke excellent English and Japanese, as well as Mandarin and his native Taiwanese dialect. A large office in the county hall was filled with mementos of his American exile: baseball pennants, and signed photographs of Senators Ted Kennedy and Claiborne Pell posing with Chen and beaming with avuncular goodwill. There was also the usual collection of gifts and testimonies to high status: diplomas, prizes, sporting trophies, calligraphies, a Japanese doll in a glass case, and elaborate ornaments of jade and gnarled wood.

  Chen, still a tall, handsome figure with a thick head of hair dyed black in the common style of no-longer-young East Asian men, was ecstatic about the democratic changes in his country. It was marvelous, he said, marvelous. By the way he was bouncing in his chair, barely able to contain his excitement, you would have thought his party’s candidate had won the presidency, not Lee Teng-hui. There was only one issue left to be resolved, he said, and that was Taiwanese independence. This was an absolute necessity, for, as he put it, “we can never trust the Chinese.” The Japanese, he said, created a “clean environment” in Taiwan, but “Chinese culture” changed all that.

  The contrast between Japanese cleanliness and dirty, double-talking Chinese corruption had no doubt grown sharper over time as memories of Japanese brutality faded in the light of later Chinese betrayals. The first thing Chen did after being elected as county magistrate was to erect a monument in memory of those who had died in 1947. Then he told the education department to revise the textbooks to include the history of 2-28.

  Chen grew up in an atmosphere of bitterness and evasion. Before 2-28, he said, people talked about politics, but afterward there was silence. He was always conscious that Taiwanese were treated as second-class citizens in their own land and punished for speaking their language at school, but the worst thing, in his recollection, was the corrosive effect of mainlander rule on what he called the Taiwanese mentality. “People used to be honest, but after Chinese culture was forced on us, we changed. Nobody told the truth any longer. It was too dangerous.” Again that question of truth and the humiliation of being forced to live a lie. And again the idea, expressed by a Chinese, that other Chinese cannot be trusted, that, in Chen’s words, the Chinese are “tricky people.”

  Chen studied mathematics and did his military service in Taiwan. He left for the United States in 1964—not to be a political activist, but because all the good jobs were taken by “those Chinese,” meaning mainlanders. In the U.S., Chen became an American citizen, but like many others, he drifted into the politics of Taiwanese nationalism. This wasn’t an easy cause. But the dissidents bided their time, writing anonymous articles (to avoid trouble for their families on Taiwan) and arguing their case against the KMT. And they quarreled, as overseas dissidents do, in their various émigré organizations, splintering into this faction or that. Some advocated violent rebellion; others took a more evolutionary view. There were rumors of mishandled funds and sexual improprieties. Leaders were deposed and reputations damaged by allegations of spying. And yet, compared to the mainland-Chinese dissidents today, the Taiwanese held together, mainly because, whatever their differences, they were united by the aim of national independence.

  Little by little, they began to be taken more seriously, by liberals such as Ted Kennedy, but also by members of the Republican administration under Ronald Reagan, when U.S. policy moved away from automatic support of anti-Communist allies and toward the encouragement of democracy. The People’s Republic of China had been officially recognized by Washington in 1979, when Taiwan was still under martial law. Promised elections were suspended. The Kaohsiung Incident, on December 10, 1979, got international attention. And a series of political murders, including the shooting of Henry Liu, a dissident journalist, in San Francisco, gave the Taiwanese regime an increasingly seedy reputation. Liu had written a critical biography of President Chiang Ching-kuo, the Generalissimo’s son and successor. Liu’s killer was a Taiwanese gangster, but the orders had allegedly come from the Taiwanese security police, led by another Chiang—Ching-kuo’s son, Hsiao-wu.

  When Mark Chen was finally able to go home, at the age of fifty-nine, Taiwan had become a democracy. The way he moved about his large office, his easy but firm manner of talking to his staff, and his obvious enthusiasm for solving local problems gave him the air of an aristocrat restored to his rightful place—the lord who came back to his manor. But of course he was not a lord; he had been freely elected. I asked him about his children, whose photographs I had noticed on his desk: three smiling young men with their father’s thick eyebrows. “Well,” he said, with a quick intake of breath, “they are in the U.S. They came to see me here, once . . . to eat the food. They like Chinese food. But they don’t speak the language. They can’t really adjust to the life out here. They are Americans now.”

  There are others like Chen who came home alone, leaving their children in the U.S. or Japan. Not all of them fitted in as easily as he seems to have done. After those heady times in the mid-1990s, the DPP was soon taken over by men and women who had stayed in Taiwan all along. Many had spent long spells in prison. After a period of polite respect, to give them “face,” old exiles like Peng Ming-min were slowly eased off the scene. Their role as keepers of the flame abroad had been played out. Some of them found it hard to adjust to a country that had changed almost beyond recognition. I thought of the mainland Chinese exiles I knew, Wei Jingsheng, Liu Binyan, Chai Ling, Li Lu, Su Xiaokang, and the others, and wondered whether they would ever return in triumph before retiring as has-beens, no longer at home abroad, but estranged from the country they had grown up in.

  The man who is now director of the Taiwan Association for Human Rights in Taipei once tried to assassinate Chiang Ching-kuo in New York. He suddenly turned up in Taiwan in 1996, after spending thirty-two years abroad, much of that time in hiding. No one quite knows how he entered Taiwan without a passport. All he will say is that he didn’t arrive by spaceship. Officially, he is not even there. But since his botched attempt at assassination occurred in 1970, he can no longer be charged in Taiwan, where twenty years is the limit for criminal prosecution.

  “Peter” Huang Wen-hsiung is altogether a mysterious character. But this much we know: He was born in a small town near Taipei in 1937. So he was ten at the time of the 2-28 Incident. Like Mark Chen, he recalls the festive first days of rebellion. Everyone seemed to be happy. The Taiwanese were in control of much of the island. At night you could hear gunfire. During the day things were quiet. But everything changed when KMT reinforcements arrived from China. Names of people who had been executed were posted at the railway station. Friends were taken away, their hands tied with rope. People went mad with fear. After that you had to pretend that nothing had happened.

  I was having lunch with Huang in a small Japanese-style coffee shop, which served sweet soft drinks, ice cream, and lukewarm spaghetti; some plump young girls were eating all the various offerings at the same time. I wanted to know what had driven this soft-spoken, articulate, highly educated (Pittsburgh and Cornell) man to attempt such a desperate measure as shooting the future president of Taiwan. Strands of thin gray hair sprouted on the sides of an otherwise bald head, giving him a monkish look, and a pair of steel eyeglasses rested on the tip of his nose. Only the occasional baring of his teeth, rather like a wince of someone who has just been punched in the face, offered a hint of obduracy or perhaps aggression.

  “I was never a so-called good boy,” he said. He had what might be called “an authority problem.” Trouble began early on, when he was kicked out of five different schools. In one case he had found evidence that a particularly unpleasant civics teacher had once been convicted for bribery. He posted evidence of this on the blackboard, whereupon the school authorities panicked. Huang’s class was made to stand outside in the sun until the culprit confessed. After standing for hours in the exhausting heat, Huang decided to come forward. “That,” he said, “is the trouble with this country. You cannot use knowledge to show disres
pect to your elders.”

  Like so many Chinese rebels, Huang believes there is something basically wrong with his “culture.” He believes that Asians are, as he puts it, “underindividuated” (Huang studied sociology). “The social roles always overwhelm the person. That is partly what I rebelled against. Since I was always marked as a maverick, I got used to it and began to enjoy it.” This was the first time I saw him bare his teeth in that slightly wolfish manner.

  He says he would never have gone after Chiang Ching-kuo if he had been the citizen of a Western democracy, where there are institutional ways for one leader to succeed another without bloodshed or coercion. But in Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek had instituted the “barbarous dynastic practice” of grooming his son, Ching-kuo, to take his place. Different factions inside the KMT had been “pacified,” and in 1970 the Chiang dynasty was set to rule for many years. Killing the heir apparent, therefore, made sense, for it would create divisions in the ruling party and thus, Huang hoped, offer more scope for democratic change. It had to be done by a Taiwanese and not a hired gangster, and it had to be accomplished without killing innocent bystanders, for that would have made the democracy movement “look bad.” Finally, it would be best if it were done by a person who had little to lose—no children or career or anything of that sort. Huang, a bachelor, a maverick, and an active figure on the anti–Vietnam War scene, was the perfect man for the job.