Written by Wang Ting-Yu
Image credit: Provided by author. In 2023, Taiwan’s Executive Yuan launched the National Action Plan for Transitional Justice Education (2023–2026), outlining reforms to curriculum development, public-sector training, and civic engagement. The plan was to expand the use of political archives, legalise sites of injustice, and promote healing from past political violence. In its final stage, the author was invited to deliver a public lecture on transitional justice at the National 228 Memorial Museum on March 1 and revisit these commitments to assess what has been achieved and what challenges remain on Taiwan’s path of democratic reckoning.
You have certainly heard of Ireland. But have you ever heard of “the Ireland of the Pacific”?
In her 2023 open course, History of Taiwan’s Postwar Democratic Movement, offered at National Taiwan University, the historian Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮) drew attention to a press warning during the postwar period, which cautioned that shortly after the Second World War, if the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government continued to govern Taiwan through coercion and repression, the island might follow Ireland’s trajectory, one shaped by sustained resistance and eventual demands for separation. This “Ireland analogy” was not merely a rhetorical flourish. Rather, it reflected how international observers at the time perceived the mounting tensions surrounding the Nationalist government’s takeover of Taiwan. The comparison invoked Britain’s protracted rule over Ireland and the nationalist mobilisations that culminated in armed struggle and independence. Implicit in the warning was a broader political argument, which is that governance grounded in military authority risks eroding state legitimacy and fostering separatist imaginaries.
On February 28 1947, a violent crackdown began in Taiwan, killing tens of thousands over the months. That tragedy still haunts the Taiwanese political environment and ordinary lives, forging a deep distrust of unchecked state power that endures today.
This year, on the eve of the white terror anniversary, a film named “The Century Bloodshed”, which was inspired by an unresolved political murder case from the Lin family in 1980, reignited this societal trauma. The production team had not sought the family’s consent and transformed an alleged case of state violence into a commercial detective thriller while repackaging a real tragedy as entertainment. Many saw the film not as a creative adaptation but as a violation. The film’s controversy revealed a deeper crisis, which is why key archives remain sealed more than forty years after these crimes. Britain faced similar questions over the death of Dr David Kelly. Taiwan does too. Yet while other democracies have grappled with transparency, Taiwan’s archives remain locked behind claims of national security. The real question is blunt here. If a government is truly committed to transitional justice, why does it refuse to open the files?
Revisiting a Sealed Crime Scene
On February 28 1980, when Taiwan was still under the shadow of martial law and military trials, the KMT government detained Lin Yi-hsiung, a former local councillor, on charges of rebellion. That same day—the anniversary of the massacre on February 28 1947—an unidentified intruder broke into Lin’s heavily monitored home. What happened next made the detention look deliberately timed. Lin’s mother, 60, was murdered, together with his seven-year-old twin daughters, who became victims. His nine-year-old eldest daughter was gravely wounded but survived.
The official narrative crumbled under scrutiny. Despite the house being under dense surveillance, the perpetrator was able to enter, kill and leave without detection. He reportedly made a phone call after the attack. For many, this was not an ordinary crime but a political assassination—one execution orchestrated by the state against a political dissident.
For over forty years, attempts to verify the truth through official archives have encountered a disturbing reality: key evidence appears to have been sealed away in what critics describe as an absurd “time capsule.” Signs of deliberate concealment marked the aftermath of the crime.
When the crime occurred, standard procedure required prosecutors and criminal police to investigate. Instead, within a week, senior intelligence officials seized control. The investigation moved from the judiciary to the security apparatus, a move that signalled institutional interference designed to protect those in power. Then came the surveillance tapes. Intelligence authorities initially claimed that recordings of a key suspect had been erased. Years later, internal records revealed the tapes had been fully preserved. This was not incompetence. It was a deliberate lie that deepened public distrust that the state had something to hide.
Can “National Security” Serve as a Blanket Justification?
In a state governed by the rule of law, how can the criminal files of a family massacre remain concealed for decades?
In 2023, Taiwan’s Control Yuan reported that the National Security Bureau still held more than 4,000 political files classified as “permanently confidential,” including materials directly related to the Lin family murders. Even documents transferred to the National Archives Administration remain inaccessible. Officials restrict access by arguing that disclosure might “seriously affect national security or foreign relations,” a justification that has spanned decades, endlessly delaying answers.
The most recent developments, however, mark a notable shift. According to President Lai Ching-te, the National Security Bureau has now declassified and transferred approximately 140,000 unredacted political records to the National Archives Administration for public access, including materials released since Taiwan’s first democratic transfer of power in 2000. At the same time, President Lai acknowledged that the archives relating to the Lin family case remain incomplete. He noted that much of the oral testimony collected over the years has proven unreliable or, in some instances, fabricated. The fragmentary nature of the records means that further analysis and careful historical research will be required before the full truth of the case can be properly understood.
In struggles over historical memory, time is never neutral. For those attempting to reconstruct a fuller account of past violence, the passage of years rarely clarifies; instead, it erodes evidence, reshapes narratives, and diffuses responsibility. As records disappear and witnesses age, which might once have been established with precision, recedes into ambiguity. Within that ambiguity, political power acquires greater latitude to define the past on its own terms. Questions of state responsibility, once framed as matters of legal and public accountability, risk being recast as abstract expressions of regret.
For many advocates of transitional justice, two developments are especially troubling. First, the very institutions implicated in past abuses now retain the authority to decide whether relevant archives should be declassified. Under broadly framed provisions in the National Intelligence Work Act and the Political Archives Act, security agencies have established a strong institutional barrier. Its foundation lies in an expansive and elastic interpretation of “national security.”
Second, this raises a deeper legal question. An intelligence body that operated for decades during authoritarian rule without a clear statutory basis—only formally legalised in 1993—now invokes the powers of a democratic state to shield its past conduct. Should surveillance and investigatory practices carried out in a legally ambiguous or unlawful era automatically qualify for protection under contemporary secrecy laws?
At present, the prevailing approach remains for security agencies to rely on the expansive and elastic notion of “national security,” arguing that disclosure of the archives could expose the identities of serving intelligence officers or cause serious harm to national security.
In a functioning democracy, national security is undoubtedly a legitimate concern. But when invoked without transparency or proportionality, it ceases to be a narrowly tailored safeguard and becomes something else entirely—an all-purpose shield that protects institutions from scrutiny. In Taiwan’s ongoing reckoning with its authoritarian past, the core question is not whether national security matters. It is whether a government can be allowed to override and invoke it indefinitely to hide political murders from its own people. If “national security” functions as a blanket defence against accountability, it risks undermining the very democratic order it claims to protect.
Restoring the Public’s Right to Know
Political archives are not neutral historical records. They are, in essence, fragments of memory assembled within structures of unequal power. Intelligence reports were often written to satisfy superiors and political objectives, and the words or actions of those under surveillance were frequently interpreted through a lens of suspicion. If, in 2026, we continue to obscure the context in which abuses occurred, what remains is not history but distortion. A version of transitional justice that names victims yet leaves perpetrators faceless risks inflicting a second injustice upon the truth.
The right to understand major political events does not belong solely to the Lin family; it reflects the Taiwanese society as a whole. In 2014, the European Court of Human Rights decided Al Nashiri v. Poland, a case with clear lessons for Taiwan. Poland had secretly cooperated with the United States of America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to operate a detention facility where torture and unlawful imprisonment occurred. The Polish government refused disclosure by citing national security. The Court rejected this argument.
The judgment was unequivocal in stating that, in cases of serious human rights violations, the state bears a legal obligation to account to society, not just to victims. National security cannot serve as a permanent shield for abuses of power. When a state’s own institutions may bear responsibility for wrongdoing, identifying those responsible becomes essential to restoring public confidence.
Therefore, the full disclosure of archives and the identification of those responsible within the system are not about settling scores. They are about enabling a democratic society to learn how its institutions went wrong. If responsibility never has to be named, then “just following orders” will continue to serve as a convenient excuse for harm, and the banality of evil may quietly persist within the very structures meant to guard against it. These principles are not remote from democratic experience.
In the United Kingdom and elsewhere, what people often want is not simply to assign blame but to understand what really happened. When long-unanswered questions are examined openly—through public enquiries, the release of documents, or the declassification of sensitive files—debate can move away from suspicion and towards accountability and constructive discussion.
The release of the “Mandelson papers” in Britain exemplifies this. Transparency was not sought to reopen old divisions but to ground political discussion in reliable facts. Archives serve democracy only when citizens can access them. Therefore, recently, Taiwan’s legislative reform agenda has focused on opening up more political records to help victims and society at large establish the truth. Key amendments have clarified the scope of what counts as political archives and strengthened agencies’ obligations to transfer relevant materials, and introduced heavier penalties for institutions or organisations that destroy or conceal records. The aim is straightforward: to ensure that archives are genuinely opened, rather than merely promised on paper.
Transitional justice and freedom of information are, at their core, public commitments. They express a shared promise that victims will not be left to shoulder memory alone, that those responsible will not remain permanently concealed, and that reflection on the past will not be silenced.
Wang Ting-Yu (王鼎棫) is Editor of the Culture, Humanities and Law section at Khisu Publishing and an Adjunct Lecturer in the Departments of Law at Soochow University, Providence University and Shih Hsin University. He is a columnist for CommonWealth Magazine (天下雜誌)’s Crossing（換日線）, Independent Review（獨立評論）, and Ageing (銀天下), and formerly served as Editor-in-Chief of Plain Law Movement (法律白話文運動). For speaking or collaboration enquiries, please contact wtybb0112@gmail.com.
This article was published as part of a special issue on “Thirty-Nine Years after Martial Law: Fractured Truths, Silence, and Unconscious Forgetting“.
Taiwan Insight 