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A Tragic Ethnic Conflict in Post-war Taiwan: Reviewing the 228 Uprising Through the IMEP Model as the Primary Analytical Framework

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Abstract

This paper examines the 228 Uprising, which occurred in February 1947 in post-war Taiwan, employing Michael Mann’s IMEP model as the primary analytical framework and suggesting that the uprising was in nature an ethnic conflict heavily influenced by at least four types of structural factors: political, military, economic and ideological. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: What were the structural factors that contributed to the 228 Uprising? How should we interpret these factors to understand the nature of the uprising? Why did the Taiwanese people who participated in the riots act so violently against the provincial government in Taiwan? Factionalism and a low level of the state power were serious political problems, which resulted in lax military discipline and a failed statist economic policy. These military and economic conditions fuelled ideological discourses that called for democracy and self-governance by the Taiwanese. Moreover, the negative interactions between the Taiwanese and the Mainlanders contributed to the emergence of a Taiwanese ethnic identity and echoed those discourses. It can be argued that Taiwanese elites and masses fused their ethnic identity with their ideal of democracy. Thus, in the eyes of many Taiwanese participating in the uprising, that fusion justified violent actions against Chen Yi’s provincial regime and the military establishment in Taiwan.

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Notes

  1. The sequence of the spelling of the IMEP model is IEMP in Mann’s [1] original version. In this paper, the author of this paper alters the sequence to IMEP simply for ease of pronunciation.

  2. In this paper, the term, Taiwanese, refers to what has been widely used in common language in contemporary Taiwan, Benshengren. That is, the Han Chinese who immigrated to Taiwan before the revendication of Taiwan in 1945. Primarily, they moved to Taiwan during the Qing Dynasty. The term, Mainlanders (which is Waishengren in common language in Taiwan), refers to the Chinese people who mainly moved to Taiwan after the Second World War, no matter to which ethnic group in Mainland China they belonged.

  3. The Taiwanese elites who immigrated to Mainland China during Japanese rule were called Banshan (Half Mountain), and the Taiwanese people formerly called the Mainlanders Tangshanren (or Ashan, people from the Tang Mountain).

  4. Notably, certain radical Taiwanese elites, such as Huang Jinan and Lin Maosheng, either privately or publicly supported the independence of Taiwan. The American deputy consul in Taiwan, George Kerr, supported this radical movement [30, 33]. It is also worth noting that the ideology of the independence of Taiwan gradually gained momentum even after the central state sent troops to pacify the 228 Uprising. One of the many critical reasons for the ideology to acquire more and more support is that the pacification of the uprising was not a simple imposition of order; personal revenges, cases of injustice, feigned cases and other abuses of power coexisted with the pacification. These unfortunate, negative side effects generated grievances; they not only strengthened the ethnic boundary between the Taiwanese and Mainlanders, but also became concrete evidence supporting the discourses that advocated the independence of Taiwan. The author cannot analyse the origins and development of this political movement in this paper. However, the author acknowledges the viewpoint that the formation and transformation of ethnic and national identities are constantly evolving processes. They are shaped by and manifested in socio-political structures and events.

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Acknowledgments

The author of this paper would like to thank the four anonymous referees very much for their insightful comments and useful advice. However, the author alone is responsible for any mistake he may have committed in this paper.

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  1. Graduate Institute of Marine Affairs, National Quemoy University, Number 1, Daxue Road, Jinning Township, Kinmen County, 89250, Taiwan, Republic of China

    Kuang-hao Hou

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Hou, Kh. A Tragic Ethnic Conflict in Post-war Taiwan: Reviewing the 228 Uprising Through the IMEP Model as the Primary Analytical Framework. East Asia 32, 43–65 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12140-014-9222-2

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