The February 28 Redress Movement

On February 4, 1987, three men announced the founding of the February 28 Peace Day Promotion Association: the physician Chen Yung-hsing, the lawyer Lee Sheng-hsiung, and the magazine publisher Cheng Nan-jung. Martial law would not be lifted for another five months and was still in force, and the words "February 28" had been silent in public for forty years. The association made only three demands: publish the truth, redress the wrongs, and designate February 28 a day of peace.

Commemorations were held that year in Chiayi, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Taipei, and most were blocked, dispersed or surrounded by police. But the difficulty did not come only from the authorities. Many families of the victims did not want to be commemorated. What they had learned across forty years was not to mention it: death certificates gave some other cause, children were told their father had "gone away," and neighbors knew and did not ask. For these households, the people shouting in the street in 1987 brought fear along with hope.

After martial law ended things began to move, slowly. In 1989 the first February 28 memorial in Taiwan was completed in Chiayi City; that same year Hou Hsiao-hsien's A City of Sadness won the Golden Lion at Venice, the first feature film to touch the event openly. Oral history collection began in earnest in the early 1990s — interviewers often had to call at a house several times before an elderly woman would agree to describe what had happened on a morning more than forty years before.

The official response began in 1990, when the Executive Yuan established a research group on the February 28 Incident, led by academics and permitted to open files that had been sealed. Its report, published in February 1992, was the first government document to acknowledge the scale of the killings, estimating the dead at between eighteen and twenty-eight thousand. The report deliberately avoided assigning blame, but it achieved something that had been impossible until then: it put the numbers on the state's own paper.

On February 28, 1995, Lee Teng-hui stood before the newly completed memorial in Taipei New Park and apologized to the families as head of state. That year the Statute for Handling and Compensating the February 28 Incident took effect, a memorial foundation was created, and applications for compensation and the restoration of reputations began to be processed. In 1996 New Park was renamed the 228 Peace Memorial Park; in 1997 February 28 became a national day of remembrance. Ten years, exactly, from the founding of the association.

The arguments did not end there. Some held that using "compensation" rather than "reparation" was a deliberate evasion of state responsibility — the wording was not changed until 2007. Some held that a report which named no perpetrators had done only half the work. And some, particularly in mainlander families and among those with military backgrounds, held that raising it again and again could only tear the society apart, and that their own fathers had been part of that era too.

But what those three men wanted in 1987 was modest: to make the thing sayable. Every later instrument of transitional justice in Taiwan — the opening of the archives, the political archives act, the Transitional Justice Commission — rests on one simple precondition, that this subject is no longer taboo. And the precondition was not granted by anyone. It was shouted out in February 1987, while martial law was still in force, by three men.