Transitional Justice

When martial law was lifted in 1987 and the ban on new political parties and newspapers followed, Taiwan inherited a forty-year backlog of unacknowledged political violence. The February 28 Incident of 1947, in which an uprising against post-war Kuomintang rule was crushed with an estimated ten to twenty thousand dead, had been an unspeakable subject for two generations. Tens of thousands more had been executed, imprisoned, or blacklisted under the White Terror of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, their files sealed and their families silenced. Democratization without reckoning, many argued, would be democratization in name only.

The first steps came haltingly. In 1995 President Lee Teng-hui formally apologized on behalf of the state for February 28; monuments were raised, a memorial day designated, and modest compensation offered to victims' families. Through the 1990s and 2000s, a patchwork of rehabilitation statutes returned confiscated property, expunged wrongful convictions, and permitted survivors to speak their names in public for the first time. Yet the underlying apparatus of authoritarian memory — the ill-gotten assets of the Kuomintang, the ubiquitous statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the classified security files, the unidentified perpetrators — remained largely untouched.

The passage of the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice in 2017 and the inauguration of the Transitional Justice Commission in 2018 formally institutionalized the work. The Commission was mandated to open political archives, remove authoritarian symbols from public space, restore the reputations of the wrongfully convicted, and recover improperly obtained party assets. Its brief tenure — concluded in 2022 — produced tens of thousands of rehabilitation decisions, a sweeping review of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, and fierce political backlash. Critics from the pan-Blue camp accused it of partisan persecution; survivors and scholars argued its powers were, if anything, too circumscribed to reach those most responsible.

This volume traces Taiwan's long and unfinished reckoning with its authoritarian past. Through compensation decrees, commission reports, memorial inscriptions, and oral histories of the bereaved, it documents how a democracy once built atop silenced graves has slowly, painfully learned to name its dead, question its heroes, and weigh what justice can still mean decades after the fact.