The 1947 Taiwanese Rebellion: Last Battle of the Sino-Japanese War?Victor Louzon, Yale UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2015 The thesis focuses on the “February 28 Incident” (or “228 Incident”), a 1947 Taiwanese revolt against the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) authorities who had taken over the island in 1945, after fifty years of Japanese colonization. The KMT governorate led by Chen Yi quickly alienated the population by its inefficiency, corruption, and exclusion of Taiwanese people from most positions of power. It also, in the context of ongoing civil war on the mainland, proved unable to provide residents with the stability and standard of living that had prevailed under Japan. The rebellion spread across the island in a few days following a police blunder, before being quickly and very brutally repressed by reinforcements arriving from the mainland. The event is at the heart of contemporary Taiwanese memory struggles about the legitimacy of Chinese sovereignty over the island. My main object is to explore political violence, its repertoires, meaning, and origins. I devote equal attention to the Taiwanese insurgency, which can only be understood in light of Japanese colonization, and to the repression carried out by KMT forces, which bears the mark of state- and nation-building in early twentieth-century China. Since the 228 Incident has been extensively memorialized in Taiwan, the thesis begins with a history of the successive narratives of the event, which closely follow the course of Taiwanese political history. The imposition of an anti-Communist narrative by the KMT state during the Cold War was followed by a liberation of speech during the democratization of Taiwan. The movement for the rehabilitation of the victims gradually won its case. Over the past twenty years, with the entrenchment of pro-independence political forces and the rise of Chinese irredentism, the 228 Incident has been used as a cautionary tale against any reunification. On the Chinese nationalist side, the anti-Communist narrative of the incident gave way to an anti-Japanese one, identifying Taiwan’s colonial past as the source of the crisis. Taiwan has had a long tradition of uprisings against the state, since the late seventeenth-century Qing conquest. This subversive violence was embedded in an endemic competitive violence exacerbated by the fact that Taiwan was a frontier society. State-building efforts at the end of the nineteenth century led to new forms of protest. Armed struggle against Japanese colonization after 1895 built on this experience of resistance against state penetration, with the additional element of ethnic opposition. From 1915 onwards in the Han territories, the repertoires of protest were largely pacified, before the authoritarian turn of the 1930s and then World War II put an end to any autonomous political life. The event is at the heart of contemporary Taiwanese memory struggles about the legitimacy of Chinese sovereignty over the island. The 1947 rebellion was markedly different from past uprisings. It started in the cities; affected the whole island as a coherent space; massively involved educated youth (including girls, although in a supporting role); and made intensive use of modern means of communication and transport. The 228 Incident was deeply shaped by colonial modernity, and was dual in its social components. On the one hand, former colonial elites stepped in to replace paralyzed local authorities, forming “Resolution Committees” that put forward demands for local and provincial autonomy through mostly peaceful means. On the other hand, these committees tried, usually to little avail, to control numerous groups of young, more violent, rebels. The Taiwanese Communists sometimes managed to coordinate some of these groups, but were unable to impose their political agenda. The repertoire of actions and symbols these young rebels tapped into was recent: it originated in the mobilization of society by the Japanese government-general during World War II. This mobilization had resulted in the militarization of Taiwanese society through the recruitment of soldiers, the creation of youth organizations, and the dissemination of basic military education. Wartime colonialism proved both more coercive and more inclusive than peacetime colonialism, opening up new avenues of upward social mobility (material and symbolic) for Taiwanese youth from modest backgrounds. This coincided with an accelerated cultural Japanization. Militarized Taiwanese youth saw their social standing suddenly lowered after 1945 but were not completely demobilized, since their skills proved useful in the troubled postwar social conditions. When the revolt broke out, these youth spontaneously remobilized the networks, know-how, and imaginary developed during the war. Their ideology was not clearly defined. Loyalty to Japan was largely absent, and explicit political statements scarce. To some extent, the actions of armed groups spoke for themselves. They attacked mainlanders (civilians, police, and soldiers) on the streets, most of the time without homicidal intent, although dozens died; the goal was usually to intimidate or imprison mainlanders with the hope that they would relinquish positions of power, or even leave the island. Through the usurpation of police functions, the rebels regained possession of the public space and expressed their conviction that they were more capable of enforcing order than the “Chinese.” The rebels of 1947 nurtured a self-image as “civilized” people as opposed to mainland Chinese people, who were often presented, through Japanese colonial categories, as “backward.” The Chinese perception of the Taiwanese uprising owes a lot to these references to Japanese militarism. KMT authorities identified immediate causes of the revolt (the economic crisis, the ambitions of Taiwanese notables, a largely imaginary Communist plot) and deeper causes, which were invariably linked to the deleterious influence of Japan. The island was perceived through the lens of the violent yet symbiotic fifty-year relationship between Japanese imperialism and Chinese nation building, of which the Sino-Japanese War was the acme (a period that coincided exactly with the era of Japanese control over Taiwan). After 1945, the Chinese governorate on the island tried to emulate the Japanese government-general, which was considered efficient, while trying to erase cultural marks of the colonial era. The Incident signalled the failure of this attempt and was thoroughly humiliating for the authorities in Taipei. Seen from the national capital of Nanjing, it was not a strategic threat, but it was an international embarrassment. The restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan, promised by the Allies in 1943, was one of the symbols of the fragile and contested victory of 1945. The embarrassment was aggravated when some Taiwanese notables requested the intervention of the United States. KMT propaganda considerably exaggerated the violence of the rebels against civilians, explicitly presented as a resurgence of Japanese atrocities in China. The bulk of the suppression was carried out by mainland troops who knew nothing about Taiwan. Chen Yi’s government, following the Japanese example, relied on the police and not the army, which had largely been sent back to the mainland in 1946. This police, whose lower ranks were entirely occupied by islanders, collapsed at the first shock. Chen Yi thus had to stall and make concessions that emboldened the rebels before reinforcements arrived. The military personnel in charge of the repression had two main components. On the one hand, politicized, highly nationalistic officers from the Whampoa Academy; on the other, Sichuanese troops with much less ideological training but an intensely traumatic and brutalizing experience of combat against Japan, who had been kept battle-ready to fight the Communists after 1945. These two groups were highly receptive to the framing of the pacification of Taiwan as an extension of the anti-Japanese struggle. The disproportionate violence of the repression had two aspects. On the one hand, military intelligence assassinated or imprisoned rebellious elites, some of whom had not participated in the Committees, targeting in particular those individuals deemed to be the most compromised by the Japanese. This operation was framed as a second postcolonial purge, the first having been fairly limited. On the other hand, the army engaged in indiscriminate killings that were primarily aimed at young men, especially if they showed outward signs of Japaneseness. This unleashing of violence was not ordered but enabled by the authorities, who turned a blind eye and legitimized it by portraying the rebellion as an act of war. The suppression went along with a summary rebuilding of state authority that used counterinsurgency methods tested against the Communists in the 1930s. This was accompanied by a propaganda campaign designed to persuade the Taiwanese that they belonged to the Chinese nation and partook in its victory over “fascist” Japan. The 228 Incident crushed all resistance against the Chinese state in Taiwan. With the KMT’s withdrawal to the island in 1949, its priority shifted from the eradication of the colonial legacy to the anti-Communist struggle. Positive references to the island’s Japanese past were nevertheless banned, as the nationalist dictatorship established Taiwan as a conservatory of Chinese culture. Those references only resurfaced with the liberalization of the regime and the emergence of “Taiwanese identity” as a central concern of political debate.
