Teaching Sleeping Dogs New Tricks? Transitional Justice as Identity-Building

Introduction

Taiwan gradually democratised in the 1990s and has generally been a stable and prospering democracy (Fell 44ff). Yet, despite regular, free, non-violent multi-party elections and transfers of power, Taiwan has seen bouts of at times violent protest, such as the 2014 Sunflower Movement. This is frequently understood (cf. Rowen and Rowen) as long-term impact of hitherto unaddressed crimes surrounding the 1947 228 Incident and during the martial law period (White Terror, 1949–1987). Ostensibly in response, 2016-elected President Tsai established comprehensive Transitional Justice (TJ) mechanisms to address grievances from Taiwan’s authoritarian past, which in design and scope appear to not only represent lessons learnt from Taiwan’s previous incomplete TJ attempts, but also from other countries’ TJ experience.

This article however argues that mechanisms and institutions introduced by the Tsai government should chiefly be read as identity building efforts, rather than as a route to positive peace in Galtung’s taxonomy. TJ mechanisms allow Taiwan to shift the focus from narratives of identity told through the prism of Chinese history to instead consider Taiwan and Taiwanese history on its own terms, rather than assessing Taiwaneseness as degrees and in terms of or juxtaposed to Chineseness, that way implicitly self-imposing, accepting the validity of, engaging in and thus reifying these very discourses. As such, then, this emancipatory process of identity construction beyond the Taiwan–China nexus is internal, i.e. by establishing shared narratives domestically and thus performing Taiwan’s identity as a democratic country, and external by creating brand awareness and (re)claiming Taiwan’s place within an imagined community of democratic nations. This is part of larger diplomatic efforts to emphasise a positive identity of Taiwan – what Taiwan can do for the world (Schafferer, Foreign Aid).

My argument is anchored in the following chain of reasoning: First, academic deliberations as to what constitutes practicable pathways to positive peace remain deficient: To date, no hard-and-fast, implementable guidelines for TJ processes and bodies – let alone full blueprints – have been produced by the academy. Indeed, the existence of any universal blueprint would inherently clash with commonly declared notions of TJ having to be highly localised (cf. Bell 7ff). Taiwan’s TJ programmes consequently cannot be understood ex ante to aim to achieve positive peace. Second, the design of the mechanisms implemented under Tsai focusing on truth-finding rather than prosecution forcibly is an exercise in identifying, creating and establishing commonly shared narratives of the past: Given Taiwan’s extant public democratic institutions, a comprehensive, separate set of mechanisms is arguably unnecessary to attain social justice. In fact – fourth – any TJ endeavour does indeed run the risk of alienating those in Taiwan who prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. While I by no means claim that the grievances these TJ mechanisms claim to address should be discounted, resolving the grievances of those still suffering the aftermath of the 228 Incident and White Terror is a by-product: By design, the main aim of the TJ mechanisms is to establish narratives of a Taiwanese identity which does not rest in a co-constitutive Chinese identity.

This text is structured along six core sections. It opens with an introduction to core theoretical concepts. I then provide a brief overview of Taiwan’s history to contextualise unresolved tensions, earlier TJ efforts and the newly set-up Transitional Justice Committee (TJC). In this, I will trace key events since the arrival of European colonialists, focussing on the 228 Incident and White Terror. I then delineate the three phases of Taiwanese TJ effort post-democratisation, employing Schafferer’s (Rise and Fall) model, and contrast their structure, scope and remit with that of Taiwan’s recent “fourth phase” TJ programmes, particularly the TJC. Locating Taiwan’s case in the relevant wider literature on TJ throughout, I review the actual effects of the TJC and appraise the very limited scholarship on Taiwan’s TJC available today. I conclude by outlining why Taiwan’s current TJ mechanisms are geared first and foremost towards identity-building, as part of a larger shift towards creating a positive Taiwanese identity (cf. Schafferer, Rise and Fall, Wong): It is not so much about worrying that sleeping dogs will only lie for so long, it is rather about waking them up gently and teach them new tricks.

TJ efforts in East Asia and the Pacific generally remain understudied (Payne and Sikkink), even though this region has experienced multiple colonialisms (Rowen and Rowen 94). This not least applies to Taiwan’s case: Prior to Caldwell’s seminal 2018 article in the Washington International Law Journal, Taiwan’s TJ experience had been utterly underappreciated by the anglophone academy, as Chang-Liao and Chen deplore. This article hopes to make a small contribution to this debate, and also speak to larger discussions within the TJ community vis-à-vis the purpose of TJ mechanisms.

Concepts

In this article, I draw on concepts from the broader social sciences and conflict studies briefly outlined below.

Social constructionism is one of the best-travelled concepts in the social sciences. First proposed by Berger and Luckmann, social constructionism contends that the social world is made – constructed – and meaning and meaningfulness are created through social interaction in specific cultural and historical contexts rather than naturally given or innate. Building on Hobsbawm’s work on cultural practices which are considered “traditional” but in fact are recent societal inventions, Anderson by the same token argued that nations, too, as imagined communities are social constructs, i.e. entities imagined by their members: National identities and their features are not essentialist, not given, but constructed through social interaction. National-community creation processes rely on selective remembering, forgetting and reframing: Baldanza, for instance, outlines how terms to refer to the country now known as Vietnam that had originally been deemed imposed by a colonising force were reappropriated as invoking national liberation – its very opposite.

Read in the context of Taiwan, Taiwanese identity, too, is the product of expected processes of identity negotiation and construction: The absence of such processes would be the aberration. Such theorising further suggests that identity can be actively constructed by actors in positions of sufficient power.

These identity building efforts are often grounded in assumptions about an imagined Other which is everything the Self is not: Said set forth how the West constructed the Orient along clichéd, exoticising lines of everything the West is not, or indeed does not wish to be.

In international relations, the concept re-appears in Wendt, albeit with a slightly different focus, emphasising the relationship between different states: the “daily life of international politics is an on-going process of states taking identities in relation to Others, casting them into corresponding counter-identities, and playing out the result” (Wendt 21). To Wendt, collective self-images, i.e. the result of said process of identity-building through relationships with significant Others, can be positive or negative: perceived disrespect from Others can prompt states to behave aggressively towards others (Wendt 336f). In a similar vein – and looking at the domestic rather than the state as a whole – Harrison and Bruter (35) argue that a negative identity, i.e. delineating one’s own community in contrast to a threatening Other, is one hallmark of right-wing populist parties.

As Harrison has posited, Taiwanese identity is located in two key factors: economic prosperity and liberal democracy. The latter in particular has led Taiwanese identity to be defined in negative terms and in contrast with Taiwan’s main negative Other, China (or, respectively, the PRC): Taiwan as a democratic nation, unlike China. This might not, as Harrison and Bruter suggest for Western societies, trigger a shift towards right-wing populism, but as I will discuss further below, might heighten the risk of such a populist turn. At any rate, any negative identity conditioned on the identity of an Other has considerable limitations and is volatile since it relies on the identity and behaviour of the Other. As Hioe (What Do Recent Shifts in Taiwanese Identification Mean?) rightfully wonders:

As with all forms of identity, a non-Chinese Taiwanese identity risks being only a form of “negative identity,” that is, a form of identity defined in opposition to another form of identity rather than a “positive identity” that truly has its own foundations. Where do Taiwanese draw the borders between themselves and Chinese, then?

With this in mind, a positive identity – who one is, rather than who one is not – is presumably more sustainable. This is further compounded by the fact that any negotiation of Taiwanese identity as a shade of or entirely distinct from (a) Chinese identity/identities would forcibly co-opt those negotiating Taiwanese identity into narratives promoting Taiwanese identity as a variety or modulation of Chineseness: From such a starting point, any discussion of Taiwaneseness has to happen against the backdrop of Chineseness. At best, then, they provide a credible defensive argument but can never truly escape the hegemonic discursive structures of the Taiwan–China nexus. Overall, this renders open and experimental discussion of Taiwanese identity impossible and instead reifies discourses which necessarily locate Taiwanese identity in a Chinese context.

Finally, this article engages Galtung’s concept of positive and negative peace. Galtung – frequently held to be the founding father of peace studies – argued that the mere absence of interpersonal violence is negative peace, while real, positive peace describes an extended concept of peace spaces where people resolve conflicts non-violently. Negative peace refers to the absence of personal violence, while positive peace (“social justice”) more comprehensively suggests the absence of structural violence. This concept has been at the heart of much peace-building and peace-keeping research, and is commonly assumed as the sole benchmark of successful TJ processes in the field.

Historical Overview

As in most contested spaces, historiography is heatedly debated in Taiwan. In the following, I propose an introductory review of historical events commonly cited as triggers for TJ efforts.

There is some debate as to whether Taiwan’s Austronesian indigenous people came to settle in Taiwan, or indeed if Taiwan is the place from which Austronesians moved South. Either way, Taiwan’s indigenous population were clearly the first group of people to live on the island. Today, indigenous people account for only around 2% of Taiwan’s total population of 23.5 m, making them the quantitatively smallest community on Taiwan (Rigger). In the seventeenth century, Dutch and Portuguese colonisers encouraged resettlement of migrants from the mainland in Taiwan to work in agriculture and Dutch- and Portuguese-established trade operations. Koxinga – Zheng Chenggong鄭成功 – a half-Japanese, half-Chinese pirate/warlord ousted European settlers from Taiwan in 1661/62, establishing Taiwan as a base for fellow Ming loyalists. In 1683, the island was claimed by the Chinese Qing dynasty as an overseas possession, although Qing administration of and control over Taiwan was highly fragmented (Rowen and Rowen). Following the Qing dynasty’s 1895 defeat in the Sino-Japanese War, China ceded Taiwan to the victorious Japanese Empire under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. To validate claims of Japan being a potent colonial power, Japan launched a range of educational, economic and legal reforms transforming Taiwan into a model colony, from which the Taiwanese did benefit to some extent (Caldwell 5ff). Notwithstanding, the Japanese did curtail the rights of Taiwan’s non-Japanese population, ranging from virtually no representation in media, government and politics to monopolies restricting the locals’ economic space (ibid.). Hwang, whose framework is commonly used in analyses of Taiwanese TJ (cf. Caldwell), identifies this as the first of three sources of injustice. This framework does however not capture the persistent, structural discrimination of Taiwan’s indigenous population under Japanese rule and by Chinese migrants (cf. Simon).

Following Japanese defeat in WWII, Japan surrendered sovereignty over Taiwan, and the Republic of China (ROC) under the Kuomintang (KMT) asserted control. As Rowen and Rowen (99) posit, many intellectuals hoping for eventual self-administration initially welcomed the KMT as liberators from a “colonial Japanese police state” (ibid.). The KMT was at this stage deeply mired in the Chinese civil war against the Communists under Mao Zedong and took to exploiting Taiwan’s resources in support of the war effort on the mainland. Alongside unjust government monopolies and inadequate administration, this created a widening rift between the local population and mainlanders – chiefly military, police and administrative staff – gradually arriving from across the Taiwan Strait (Phillips 40ff). Simultaneously, KMT administrators – often traumatised by Japanese assaults during World War II – harboured deep mistrust vis-à-vis local Taiwanese: Unaware of and largely unaffected by the violence Japanese forces had unleashed onto China, the Taiwanese had to a great extent been Japanised and appeared visually indistinct from the Japanese the KMT had fought a few years earlier (Phillips).

The situation came to a head on February 27, 1947, when a Taiwanese woman selling contraband cigarettes was struck by government inspectors (Phillips 75f). A crowd rallied to defend the saleswoman, and violence erupted when a police officer fired his gun and killed a bystander. This triggered popular protests and riots across Taiwan, focussing on symbols of KMT rule. In response, the KMT administration imposed martial law (ibid.). These events, now known as the 228 Incident, are pivotal to the discussion of TJ in Taiwan, and marks the origin of the second source of injustice in Hwang’s framework: In the months that followed, thousands of Taiwanese were summarily executed, disappeared, imprisoned and expropriated by KMT police (Caldwell). Exact casualty totals remain unknown to date. Caldwell quotes Taiwanese military reports speaking of 398 killed, 72 missing and 2,131 injured, contrasting this to later accounts of death figures estimated to range from 5,000 to as many as 28,000.

The 228 Incident has been emblematic of atrocities in pre-democracy Taiwan, the “founding trauma” as Stolojan (28) would have it, providing a rallying cry for the pro-democracy movement. As Stolojan notes, memories of the Incident had subsided in overseas Taiwanese communities in the West and Japan, yet only gained traction again when it became part of the shared memory in Taiwan itself to then become a “model” for how other atrocities were to be addressed.

The KMT retreated to Taiwan following its defeat in the civil war. Mainlanders now accounted for one fifth of Taiwan’s total population of six million (Fell 17f). The KMT administration implemented minority authoritarian rule of the Mainlanders (waishengren 外省人), systematically and institutionally subordinating the local population, i.e. the descendants of earlier migrants from China, as well as the indigenous population. This group was henceforth collectively referred to as benshengren 本省人 (Caldwell 8f). Discursively, this ethnicised the conflict; these ethnic dimensions were later realigned with political fault lines and continue to play into ongoing debates on Taiwan’s past. The émigré KMT government under Chiang Kai-Shek imposed a Chinese nation-building programme of forced sinicisation of the benshengren majority. Taiwanese identity was not so much suspended but rather subject of a political project which aimed to cover it in layers of government-sanctioned definitions of (Chinese/ROC) identity to eclipse any contesting identities.

Chiang extended martial law and the state of emergency in Taiwan ad infinitum until the envisaged eventual recovery of the mainland from the Communists, which ultimately failed to materialise (Fell 24ff). During the next four decades, known as White Terror (1949–1987), the authoritarian government targeted not only benshengren, but anyone suspect of obscurely defined “political crimes” (Caldwell 9). Later framings suggesting that benshengren suffered while waishengren were spared during the White Terror period are factually incorrect: even benshengren activist-scholar Wu (100) estimates that approximately 40% of the victims of White Terror were Mainlanders, suggesting that waishengren were in fact overproportionately affected by the KMT government’s wanton arrests, expropriations and executions. Cultural production and collective memory commonly do not reflect this (cf. Wu): Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 侯孝賢 groundbreaking 1989 film City of Sadness 悲情城市, popularly read as an accurate depiction of life in Taiwan in the immediate aftermath of the 228 Incident, focuses on a benshengren family and reinforces the narrative of benshengren suffering at the hand of waishengren. The experience of waishengren families displaced to Taiwan from China is captured in works such as Pai Hsien-yung’s 白先勇 Taipei People 臺北人, yet the true scope of the trauma experienced by the hundreds of thousands of ordinary people escaping to Taiwan where they then lived in an eternal loop of anticipating soon return as victims of a conflict they had been embroiled in is hardly known: Yang’s exploration of these under-researched histories is thus particularly needed.

As the extent of crimes committed remains unknown, establishing clarity has been one of the key aims set for the TJC. Caldwell (9) quotes estimates indicating 140,000 civilians court-martialled, thousands imprisoned and deprived of property, around 3,000–4,000 executed. Whatever the actual quantitative ramifications, the qualitative impact of the 228 Incident and its aftermath on Taiwanese (discussions of) identity is undeniably substantial. Hwang identifies this as the third source of injustice.

In response to international and domestic pressure (Fell 28), KMT rule transformed into “soft authoritarianism” in the 1980s, allowing both waishengren and benshengren personnel within its technocratic government and shifting towards less frequent, legalist in-lieu-of direct repression (Fell 26ff). Reforms towards liberal democratic governance followed the 1987 lifting of martial law: More than 50 parties ran in the 1989 elections, although only the KMT and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP, born out of organised resistance to the KMT before democratisation) won significant numbers of seats (Fell 36). Due to the design of the KMT-established electoral system, the 1989 elections would and did not shift the balance of power. Then-President Lee Teng-Hui engaged with substantial changes to the political system demanded in the 1990 Student Protests; they were gradually implemented (Fell 38). However, the societal and institutional impact of the authoritarian period continues to be felt in Taiwan: “With some revisions, Taiwan’s 1947 constitution and government structure remains in place. Taiwan’s ethnic divide, though narrowing, is still structured among the same lines that prompted the 228 Incident (Fell 29).”

Three Stages of TJ Efforts (1987–2016)

Taiwan’s democratic transition was flanked by concurrent engagement with – and then disengagement from – TJ. Caldwell, whose 2018 review of Taiwanese transitional efforts “turned academic attention to the TJ regime of Taiwan” (Chang-Liao and Chen 619), views any TJ efforts prior to the Tsai administration as one single period. Schafferer (Rise and Fall) instead reads pre-Tsai efforts as three separate main stages. As Schafferer’s framework provides greater nuance and highlights the transitions in TJ more lucidly, I adopt his taxonomy for this article.

Conclusion

In this text, I argue that Taiwan’s TJC is a carefully crafted project not chiefly to address past wrongs, but primarily to establish shared narratives central to the modern Taiwanese national imaginary, namely the 228 Incident and the White Terror period. Cardinally, it does so to negotiate a broad, yet ultimately more stable Taiwanese identity which does not rely on China as an Other.

My review of earlier Taiwanese TJ efforts and their undoing suggests that re-engaging in TJ once again is a potentially divisive endeavour, and as such is unlikely to be an end in itself. In my analysis, I contrast Taiwan’s TJ approaches with the wider literature and experiences elsewhere, and engage assessments of the Tsai administration’s TJ system other scholars have proposed. I then put forward a critique of these readings, concluding that ultimately, Taiwan’s TJ under Tsai is best understood as a narrative-establishing and identity-building project, and is situated in wider efforts to create a positive Taiwanese identity at home and abroad. This then opens a much greater space for experimental and open definitions of Taiwanese identity which could not exist in the context of the stifling Taiwan/China dichotomy/nexus. As such, it is a highly meaningful process, rather than another iteration of an exercise in futility.

Since preliminary results of the TJC have only been made available and its efforts remain ongoing – for instance in that the TJC only in September reignited a debate by recommending the removal of Chiang’s statue from Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall – both the TJ and Taiwan Studies community might want to closely follow future developments of Taiwan’s TJC – also in a few years from now – to assess the true extent to which TJ might have served Taiwanese identity-building efforts.