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 Commis…
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.
Compensation came first. The February 28 statute of 1995 and the 1998 act on wrongful trials under martial law issued payments and certificates restoring reputations. But that was not what many families wanted. They wanted to know who had signed the order, who had taken the statement, who had come to the house and led the man away. Those answers were in the files, and the files were held by the National Security Bureau, the Investigation Bureau, the police agency and military bodies at every level. Opening them came in stages. The Political Archives Act of 2019 required agencies to search and transfer their holdings, and in 2021 the National Security Bureau released a body of long-withheld dossiers; families read their fathers' interrogation transcripts for the first time. Some found the name of the informant in the file and discovered it was a colleague, a neighbour, sometimes a relative. In four years the transitional justice commission set aside the convictions of more than six thousand people, which in law restores them as innocent. As to who did what, most families still hold only a photocopy with the names blacked out.
May 2018: commissioners of the newly established Transitional Justice Commission are sworn in at the Executive Yuan, taking on the mandate to open political archives, remove authoritarian symbols, and redress wrongful convictions from the martial-law era.
Executive Yuan, Republic of China (Taiwan)
The 228 Peace Memorial Monument in Taipei's 228 Peace Park, dedicated in 1995 alongside President Lee Teng-hui's formal apology — the first state acknowledgment of the 1947 massacre and a foundational gesture of Taiwan's transitional-justice work.
Memorial Foundation of 228
A certificate of rehabilitation issued to a White Terror survivor under the compensation and redress statutes of the 2000s, formally voiding a martial-law-era conviction and restoring the bearer's civic record.
National Human Rights Museum
Isle of Time