The February 28 Incident

On the evening of February 27, 1947, Monopoly Bureau agents seized contraband cigarettes from a widow outside the Tianma Teahouse in Taipei's Dadaocheng district, striking her with a pistol butt and, in the ensuing chaos, firing into the crowd and killing a bystander. More than a year of accumulated grievances — runaway inflation, food shortages, official corruption, and the exclusion of native Taiwanese from power — found their outlet that night. The next day, February 28, crowds marched on the Governor-General's Office to petition, only to be raked with gunfire from guards above. Word spread across the island by radio and by mouth, and within days, from Keelung to Pingtung, local committees formed and took over public order. A full-scale uprising against postwar rule had begun.

The revolt moved quickly from the streets to the negotiating table. Gentry and elected representatives formed the "February 28 Incident Settlement Committee" to seek reform through institutional means. Wang Tian-teng, a Taipei city councillor serving as the committee's propaganda chief, broadcast to the island by radio and led the drafting of the Thirty-Two Demands, calling for broad Taiwanese autonomy, the disarming of troops, and the local appointment of officials — the first systematic blueprint for self-government in postwar Taiwan. Governor Chen Yi outwardly accepted talks and promised reform while secretly cabling Nanjing for troops, buying time. The negotiation was a deception from the start.

In some regions the resistance escalated into armed struggle. In Taichung, Hsieh Hsueh-hung rallied students and youth into the "27 Brigade," briefly controlling the city before retreating to fight on in the mountains around Puli and ultimately disbanding, while she herself fled into exile. In the south, Kaohsiung Fortress Commander Peng Meng-chi refused to negotiate and on March 6 ordered his troops to shell and strafe the city from Shoushan, attacking the city hall, railway station, and First Senior High School and leaving hundreds to over a thousand dead or wounded — among the earliest and bloodiest military crackdowns on the island. Peng, later dubbed the "Butcher of Kaohsiung," was rewarded with steady promotion.

On March 8, the 21st Division, dispatched by Chiang Kai-shek from mainland China, landed at Keelung and Kaohsiung and launched an island-wide "pacification" and "village purge." The true catastrophe arrived now: soldiers and secret police hunted down names on their lists, and native elites were seized, disappeared, and executed without trial. Lin Mao-sheng, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at National Taiwan University, was led from his home on March 11 and never seen again; the financier Chen Hsin and the negotiator Wang Tian-teng were killed around the same day; the Tainan lawyer Tang Te-chang, shielding a list of names and taking responsibility upon himself, was paraded through the streets and shot at Taisho Park (today renamed in his memory); the Chiayi painter Chen Cheng-po, serving as a peace envoy in his capacity as a city councillor, was bound and publicly executed before Chiayi Station on March 25. An entire modern-educated leadership class, poised to carry Taiwan's future, was all but torn out by the roots within weeks.

The dead are estimated at ten to twenty thousand; the exact figure remains unknowable. Afterward, surviving families were forced into silence, and "228" became a taboo unspeakable for four decades, redressed, commemorated, and investigated only after martial law was lifted — a reckoning traced in the Transitional Justice volume. This volume returns to that spring of 1947, recording how a cigarette raid ignited an island-wide uprising, how the Settlement Committee's attempt at reform dissolved once reinforcements landed, and how a generation of Taiwanese elites fell amid the gunfire of the purge. Their names — Lin Mao-sheng, Chen Hsin, Wang Tian-teng, Tang Te-chang, Chen Cheng-po — are the starting point for understanding why postwar Taiwan fell silent for so long, and why it ultimately fought so hard for democracy and transitional justice.