Written by Chuan-kai Lin
Image credit: Source from National Archives Administration (國家檔案局), archival reference no.B3750347701/0041/3132270/270/1/001. Huo Zhenjiang (霍振江), a National Defence Medical College student from Hebei, China, was arrested in Taiwan in 1949 for organising a left-wing reading group. Initially sentenced to ten years, his punishment was later commuted to death. With no relatives to claim him, his body was briefly used for anatomical study; his ashes are now missing.
Following their 1949 defeat in the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) government retreated to Taiwan and established the Republic of China over what is now commonly referred to as the Taiwan–Penghu–Kinmen–Matsu territory (台澎金馬, Tai-Peng-Kin-Ma). Over the following decades of Cold War confrontation, these governing boundaries gradually solidified. Yet what appears to be a single political space contained highly uneven historical experiences.
When Taiwanese refer to “thirty-nine years after martial law,” they typically mean mainland Taiwan and the outlying island of Penghu. Both had been Japanese colonies before martial law was imposed in May 1949, which was lifted in 1987. However, Kinmen and Matsu—outlying islands already under the Republic of China’s rule before 1949—entered martial law earlier, in 1948. As frontline islands in the military standoff between the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT, they remained under martial law until 1989. Recognising these internal differences is essential when discussing the politics of memory surrounding political violence. Beneath what is often portrayed as a shared national memory lie significant differences in historical position and social experience.
Since Taiwan began its democratisation process in the 1980s, civil society has sought to confront its history of postwar state violence. Two focal points dominate these discussions: the February 28 Incident of 1947, when the state carried out military suppression across Taiwan, and the White Terror, during which the state prosecuted perceived political dissidents through military courts between 1949 and 1987 (or between 1948 and 1992 in Kinmen and Matsu).
Although scholars today clearly distinguish between these phenomena, the term “February 28” was often used in the 1990s as a shorthand for all victims of state violence. This occurred despite the February 28 Incident being brief compared to the decades-long White Terror. The conflation partly reflected the scarcity of archival materials at the time, while oral memories often merged different traumatic experiences into a single narrative.
The complexity of identifying those targeted during the White Terror further complicated public memory. The peak of repression occurred between 1949 and 1955. Some accused individuals had actual or alleged connections to underground communist networks in Taiwan, while others were labelled communist sympathisers (共產黨同情者) solely due to left-leaning political views. This political ambiguity made it difficult to construct a coherent public narrative.
Public narratives in the 1990s often portrayed February 28 victims as social elites—local Taiwanese intellectuals active in academic or public life. Although victims also included farmers, workers, and people with limited education, the elite image resonated powerfully with broader dissatisfaction toward the postwar power structure, particularly the dominance of mainland Chinese in the military, government, and education sectors. Consequently, the figure of the February 28 elite victim became a symbolic representation of all victims of state violence.
By contrast, those associated—rightly or wrongly—with communism during the 1950s White Terror occupied a more ambiguous and politically uncomfortable position. Contemporary political realities shaped this ambiguity. Since the 1990s, the People’s Republic of China has been viewed simultaneously as an economic partner and as a threat to Taiwan’s autonomy. Under these circumstances, the repression and rehabilitation of communist political prisoners became politically sensitive.
Narratives of rehabilitation in the 1990s gradually intertwined with competing nationalist narratives. Within emerging Taiwanese nationalism, the February 28 Incident was often interpreted as the moment when Taiwanese optimism toward the Republic of China government dissolved into disillusionment after 1945. Some accounts framed the massacre as a turning point that fostered Taiwanese independence consciousness, with later White Terror victims interpreted as part of a broader narrative of national awakening.
A different interpretation emerged from Chinese nationalist perspectives. Though less influential in Taiwan, this view framed events within the Cold War and the unfinished Chinese Civil War. It emphasised that many February 28 victims were initially identified with Chinese nationalism. After the United States deployed the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait in 1950, Cold War dynamics deeply shaped Taiwan’s domestic politics. In this interpretation, state repression targeted patriotic leftists advocating national reunification, making the White Terror an extension of China’s civil conflict under Cold War conditions.
These competing narratives gradually incorporated the history of political violence into rival identity frameworks. Simplified classifications emerged in popular discourse, such as the claim that political prisoners in the 1950s were mostly pro-unification leftists, while those in the 1960s were supporters of Taiwanese independence. Victims were metaphorically labelled as wearing either “red hats” (紅帽) or “white hats” (白帽), reducing complex histories to binary political categories.
Yet embedding Taiwan’s entire history of postwar political violence within nationalist narratives inevitably creates blind spots. As scholars such as Prasenjit Duara argue, nationalist histories tend to construct linear narratives while excluding heterogeneous experiences that do not easily fit them. The memory frameworks established in the 1990s produced precisely such omissions. Sociologist Ko-Hua Yap (2024), in his book Unriddling Taiwan’s Ethnic History, notes that while White Terror victims were largely native Taiwanese, nearly 40 per cent of them were mainland Chinese who arrived around 1949. Considering that mainlanders constituted only about 13–14 per cent of Taiwan’s population, this disproportion is striking. Statistics from the 1960s reveal this pattern even more clearly: between 1960 and 1969, roughly 63 per cent of those arrested were mainlanders, compared with 37 per cent native Taiwanese. Many cases involved retroactive accusations concerning activities before martial law, often based on vague or exaggerated claims of rebellion. These histories do not easily fit the simplified red-hat or white-hat framework and have therefore remained marginal.
[Note: The statistical population consists of political victims recorded in the Taiwan Transitional Justice Database. The dataset is compiled from two main sources: the “Compensation Foundation Compensation Case Files” preserved by the National Human Rights Museum, and the “Political Archives” held by the National Archives Administration. The author calculates the proportions cited here based on ongoing research.]
Other groups of victims have also been overlooked. Military personnel constitute one such category. Archival records reveal numerous political cases involving soldiers. After the United States began assisting Taiwan’s defence in 1950, the Chinese Civil War transformed into a cross-strait standoff, diminishing the strategic role of the once-dominant army relative to the navy and air force. Many lower-ranking soldiers faced poor living conditions, limited opportunities for promotion, and restrictions on forming families in Taiwan. Lacking local language skills and social networks, they remained dependent on the military system, where complaints or informal gatherings could easily be interpreted as subversive activity.
Political cases in offshore islands were also frequently neglected. Kinmen and Matsu had not experienced Japanese colonial rule and were not directly involved in the February 28 Incident. Their martial law timeline also differed from Taiwan’s. Situated less than a kilometre from mainland China at some points, the islands maintained strong historical ties with coastal Fujian and often remained peripheral to memory movements centred on Taiwan. Even early exhibits of the National Human Rights Museum largely excluded them from maps of political repression.
The category of “offshore islands” encompasses diverse histories on Orchid Island (蘭嶼, Lanyu), home to the Tao indigenous people, the military established a command centre, confiscated land, and sent criminal detainees for labour reform. On Guishan Island in northern Taiwan, residents were forcibly relocated in 1977 for military purposes and have never been permitted to return. Meanwhile, between 1945 and 1955, the Republic of China briefly governed the Dachen Islands off Zhejiang. White Terror policies were implemented there, and some prisoners were subsequently transferred to Taiwan.
Political violence also affected individuals who were not citizens of the Republic of China. During the Cold War, Taiwan encouraged overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia to visit or settle in Taiwan as part of its “Free China” diplomacy, while simultaneously subjecting them to surveillance. Some foreign nationals were imprisoned, including the Philippine Chinese prisoner Ke Qian, who spent more than thirty years in prison. Refugees were treated similarly. Although Cold War propaganda portrayed them as humanitarian beneficiaries, they could easily be suspected of espionage once on Taiwanese territory. The 1987 shooting of Vietnamese refugees by the military on Kinmen—an incident only recently investigated by Taiwan’s Control Yuan—illustrates this dynamic.
Another long-overlooked dimension concerns the experiences of victims’ families. According to the second volume of the Transitional Justice Commission’s final report (2022), about 96.6 per cent of the roughly 20,000 White Terror victims were men, while women accounted for less than four per cent. In many oral history interviews conducted in the 1990s, female family members were treated mainly as supplementary witnesses who helped reconstruct the biographies of male victims. Yet this perspective overlooks two critical points. First, because women were often excluded from political life, they did not necessarily know the details of the political activities that led to arrests. Second, family members themselves frequently became indirect victims of state violence. Property confiscation, surveillance, and the burden of raising children alone were common experiences. The stigma surrounding political cases also produced what scholars now describe as intergenerational trauma. Only in the past decade have more efforts been made to recognise their experiences as part of the historical record.
Gender and sexuality remain another underexplored dimension. Public narratives about the White Terror often emphasise victims’ innocence and political ideals while rarely addressing gendered experiences within prison. Among more than 20,000 political prisoners, not all were heterosexual. Yet these aspects remain largely absent from public memory. Strict control of intimacy and occasional sexual violence went undiscussed. One rare testimony comes from the political prisoner Feng Feng (馮馮), originally from Guangxi, who described repeated sexual assault by inmates and intelligence personnel in his memoir. He later reflected that these experiences deeply shaped his sexual identity. The absence of such discussions partly reflects the political climate of the 1990s, when rehabilitation movements prioritised political legitimacy and avoided potentially controversial topics.
Public debates about historical reflection in Taiwan continue to provoke political controversy even as support for rehabilitation grows. Much of this tension stems from the persistent tendency to interpret historical justice through competing national identity frameworks. Yet some shared moral ground exists. For instance, the return of prisoners’ final letters and remains has generated little controversy, perhaps reflecting widely shared cultural values concerning respect for the dead. By contrast, debates surrounding memorial spaces dedicated to authoritarian leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek remain highly contentious. At the same time, when more heterogeneous cases are introduced, such as elderly mainland soldiers who died alone after imprisonment or Vietnamese refugee families killed along the shores of Kinmen, people across political camps often respond with similar sympathy.
Exploring heterogeneity is therefore not merely an exercise in celebrating diversity. Rather, it reflects the historical reality that victims of postwar political violence were far too diverse to be contained within any single nationalist narrative. Allowing these overlooked experiences to emerge in public memory may open a path toward a fuller understanding of the past and a more inclusive form of historical reconciliation.
Lin Chuan-kai, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His research focuses on historical and political sociology, particularly the reconstruction of postwar protest movements in Taiwan and their public engagement.
Taiwan Insight 