Stephen_Murray's Full Review: Lai Tse-Han, Ramon H. Myers, Wei Wou - A Tragic Be...
A particularly egregious example of complicity of "scholars" with domination (indeed, complicity with large-scale, genocidal violence) is offered by Stanford’s Hoover Institution's allegedly value-free political science analysis of the 1947 revolt by Taiwanese against the oppressive Chinese regime that had been forced on them (delivered by the US Navy) and its bloody suppression. “Given the powerful political passions that still envelop the 1947 tragedy,” Lai Tse-Han, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou claimed in the introduction to their book, “a differentiation of moral and factual issues could be a major step forward in the quest for a just historical judgment” (p. 11). Whether the authors deluded themselves that “justice” is anything other than a moral issue or are attempting to confuse readers is not altogether clear, but the book obviously aimed to exculpate the highest Kuomintang officials, Republic of China President Chiang Kaishek and Governor General Ch’en Yi from responsibility for knowing what KMT troops were going to do when they landed on Taiwan (indiscriminate slaughter) and for the subsequent (somewhat more discriminate) searching out and murder of Taiwanese judged as opponents or potential critics of the regime.
The political “science” to which the authors aspired is taxonomy (Confucian "rectifying names") rather than analysis. They were particularly eager to classify the events of March 1947, closing their introduction with the admonition from Yin Hai-Kuang, “Whatever something is, that is what you say it is (Shih shen-mo, chiu shuo shen-mo)” (p. 12), and writing that “to call the episode an ‘incident’ is to place a veil over its actual nature” (p. 8).
“Tragedy” is also a veil, one in which they wrapped Chiang Kaishek and Ch’en Yi. “Tragedy” is quite an unusual analytical concept in political science. (“tragedy” is also the category used by the communist leaders of the People’s Republic of China for the “Cultural Revolution” to avoid assessing the responsibility to anyone, especially a party still hold ing power). However, it may be apt for a number of different interpretations of Taiwanese and Chinese history. For many Taiwanese, the first tragedy was that the US Navy transported troops of the Republic of China to Taiwan rather than occupying Taiwan with US or multi-national Allied troops. The armies of occupations of the islands to the north of Taiwan (the Ryukus [the largest of which is Okinawa] and of Japan) did not loot the conquered territory, did not dismantle the surviving infrastructure, and withdrew after a few years, after supervising free elections. Their record stands in marked contrast to the four decades of martial law and subsequent years of paramilitary rule of Taiwan. An earlier tragedy is that, to keep what Lai et al. (apparently without irony) refer to as “the central government” of Chiang Kai-Shek in the war with Japan, US President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill allocated Manchuria and Formosa to be “restored to the Republic of China” in the Cairo Declaration of 1 December 1943 , although Taiwan had not been a part of the ROC or even claimed by it before World War II; before Japan invaded China, both Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Zhedong advocated independence for Formosa). Following upon Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s unconcern for Taiwanese self-determination or the four freedoms that Roosevelt had enunciated as basic human rights, the depredations of ROC officials and troops were predictable, particularly with Ch'en Yi as governor, given the record of corruption and repression he built in Fujian (Gukken is the old romanization—which was blocked by the epinions filter!). A number of US military and diplomatic observers of “the central government” in Chunking filed reports on the corruption and incompetence that characterized a dependent ally which played no active part in defeating Japan (see Barbara Tuchman's Stillwell and the American Experience of China). US officials also observed and reported upon the plunder and misrule of the island. One of them, George Kerr, later wrote a book based on what he observed, Formosa Betrayed (though it was not published until 1965).
Unlike in Kerr’s view, the tragedy with which Lai et al. concerned themselves was not the jettisoning of the principle of self-determination supposedly maintained by the US, but the failure of Taiwanese to appreciate the frustrations and travails of the army of occupation allocated to them and Taiwanese dismay at ROC corruption, incompetence and brutality of those supposedly “liberating” them from Japanese colonialism. “The tragedy was a reflection of China’s struggles in the 1940s to turn itself from a traditional society into a modern one, with an efficient democratic government,” according to Lai et al. (p. 11). It is difficult to know what this statement means. Who is the “China” that was struggling and seeking "democracy"? Is a “reflection” an epiphenomenon? Are Taiwanese people and their reactions epiphenomenal and determined solely by events and patterns on mainland China? That Lai et al. wrote of Taiwan as “one small part of China” in the same paragraph (and elsewhere) supports this last interpretation. Such a characterization is anything but neutral, either in the context of 1947 or in that of current demands for the independence of Taiwan.
“One small part of China” is a telltale sign that the authors adopted the perspective of the Kuomintang as the legitimate government of Taiwan. From this perspective—and only from this perspective—“whether the dissidents’ acts in February and March amounted to sedition is a factual question that lacks a moral dimension” (p. 10), though there are few "crimes" more wrapped in "morality" in Chinese conceptions than "sedition." Even after the lifting of martial law in 1987, the KMT government treated advocacy of independence for Taiwan as sedition. Whether the only army of occupation from World War II still holding power when Lai et al. wrote should have been able to define sedition (or, indeed, to define law in general) is a question with a moral dimension that they ignored. There can only be “sedition” against a legitimate government, and the legitimacy of KMT rule of Taiwan is a question Lai et al. carefully avoided raising.
There are many instances of uncritical adoption by Lai et al. of KMT historical perspectives. One of the most egregious is the interpretation of the 1895 declaration of Formosan independence as evidence of Taiwanese “patriotic attachment to China” (p. 44). The “patria” was Formosa, not China. There was a declaration of independence, not a declaration of continued loyalty to China or to its alien (Manchurian) regime. It is understandable that the KMT would obfuscate this, but when ostensible “scientists” follow this party line, their allegiance to the KMT is starkly visible.
The authors participated in (rather than analyzed) a number of KMT definitions of a number of past and present situations. “Restoration” or “recovery” by a government (or party) of a territory it had never previously ruled has already been mentioned. By the conclusion of the book, the authors have mainlanders “returning” where they’d never been. An even more peculiar view is that the ROC defeated Japan (p. 50, p. 169). Neutral observers might wonder what battles the ROC won, how the “central government” happened to be in so peripheral a location as Chungking, and even after Japan surrendered could not get to Taiwan on its own (p. 62). Taiwanese most certainly had not seen ROC troops defeat Japanese troops. No one had! The ROC military continued to demonstrate the same prowess and tactical genius in Manchuria and elsewhere during the late 1940s that it had demonstrated during the war with Japan. To claim that in 1945 the KMT was moving from the stage of “tutelage” to that of “constitutional rule” (p. 51) is almost as peculiar and disingenuous.
Full of sympathy for the difficulties of governing China, the authors bewailed that in the late 1940s “knowing little about what had happened on the Mainland during Word War II, many Taiwanese never appreciated the seriousness of the problems confronting the Nationalist government in 1945” (p. 50). Lai et al. did not explain why Taiwanese should have been grateful or loyal to a government they had neither elected nor sought. Moreover, it is very dubious that knowing more of the record of corruption and retreat that was the story of the KMT during World War II would have increased enthusiasm for the KMT. Lai et al. admitted that before Japanese invasion, “China remained afflicted by warlordism, even in the KMT’s base area of Chekiang and Kiangsu,” and that, on the mainland, “the KMT was never able to expand its membership beyond 600,000, which constituted only about 0.003% of the country’s total population (p. 52). Aside from the fact that these numbers do not make sense together (requiring twenty billion Chinese, whereas the 1953 census enumerated 583 million and the usual KMT estimate for the population on the eve of the Japanese invasion was 450 million), it is difficult to imagine anyone seeking so unpopular a party to provide "tutelage in democracy."
Lai et al. seem to have been unable to conceive that anyone (in the 1940s or the 1990s) could question the KMT right to rule Taiwan as a part of China. They did not see anything wrong with the KMT view of Taiwan "as primarily a source of resources with which to fight important battles on the Mainland. In fact, Mainlanders felt that because Taiwan enjoyed greater wealth and higher living standards than the Mainland, Taiwanese should carry a heavier burden than other Chinese in the struggle to defeat the Communists and modernize" (p. 169) and assert that "the KMT worldview was not unreasonable. The KMT was trying to save China from Communism, seeking values in the Confucian tradition of indigenous civilization, and pursuing unification and modernization of China according to Sun Yat-sen’s vision" (p. 179).
Although they think that it would have been wise for the army of occupation not to alienate the populace, they do not consider the consent of the governed (or representation as a prerequisite for legitimate taxation) important. They recognized that “people like the P’engs [P’eng Ming-Min] saw the KMT as an institution that would drag Taiwan down to the level of Chinese backwardness” (p. 21), but could only conceive the problem with ROC critics of P’eng’s generation as deriving from a lack of “conceptual access to the evocation of Confucian ideals that was to become central to the ideology and culture of Taiwan under the KMT” on the part of those exposed to (or in the KMT view, contaminated by) liberal Western and Japanese ideas (p. 22). Such Taiwanese intellectuals were also offensively (in the view of the KMT and of Lai et al.) aware of Chinese isolation and backwardness in contrast to Taiwan’s longtime participation in the world economy. “Nothing was more offensive to the Mainlanders than the idea of looking up to the Taiwanese elite as Japanese-trained experts on modernization when Chinese had just fought and defeated the Japanese,” Lai et al. claimed (p. 50), although it is difficult to interpret World War II or even a single battle as having been won by the modernity of the KMT army. The relatively greater development of Taiwan in contrast to China in 1945-47 cannot seriously be contested, so Lai et al. de-emphasized it.
Governor General Ch’en Yi refused to speak Japanese, although he appears to have been more fluent in it than he was in Beijinghua, the official language imposed by the KMT, and although practically no Taiwanese understood Beijinghua. (And, those who did, had difficulty understanding either Ch’en Yi or Chiang Kai-Shek when they tried to speak it.). Ch’en Yi's government used the fact that “most former Taiwanese officials could not speak kuo-yü ("the national language") and were not trained to work in a Chinese administration” to justify replacing those who had “collaborated” with the Japanese “enemy” (to which an earlier Chinese regime had ceded Formosa in 1895) with Ch’en Yi's mainlander cronies and followers. (The replacement of Tai wan ese by main landers in govern ment monopoly businesses continued during the 1950). Officials, from Ch’en Yi down, did not speak the languages (Holo, Hakka, and Japanese) that Taiwanese understood. This language policy guaranteed that Taiwanese perceived the government as alien. It indicated unmistakably the view of the Taiwanese as a conquered people without rights that underlay the conduct of Ch’en Yi's government of Taiwan. Lai et al. found Ch’en Yi's refusal to use Japanese “understandable,” although they recognized that his language policy contributed to the estrangement of Taiwanese that led to their revolt.
Another of Ch’en Yi’s tactical mistakes, in the view of Lai et al., was permitting relative freedom of the press. Apparently, they were shocked (in the 1990s) that an article in the Ho-p’ing jih-pao published on 8 August 1946 “emphasized how the Taiwanese sincerely wanted democracy, and gave readers the impression that the administration was not sincerely trying to fulfill those hopes” (p. 77). They were similarly astounded that “reports often depicted complex events in a way that made the administration seem inept. . . Given the freedom to criticize the government, the press often did not provide balance” (p. 77). Lai et al. provided plenty of evidence of the ineptness of the administration. Although the authors were imbued with compassion for the sufferings and loss of face of the backward KMT officials, they did not take seriously the frustrations Taiwanese — who were accustomed to efficient and uncorrupted Japanese administration — felt.
Immediately after noting a lack of balance in the press before March 1947, Lai et al. wrote, “After the spring of 1947, when the press became more strictly controlled, it blamed the Uprising on the ‘poisonous’ influence of Japanese colonial rule, underworld elements, and riffraff” (pp. 77-78), leaving this official view as an apparent example of the balance so sadly lacking before March 1947. Probably not coincidentally, their example of balance corresponds to the explanation for the revolt offered by Ch’en Yi:
Yet, Lai et al. joined the Taiwanese of the 1940s in recognizing at least the corruption and incompetence of the Ch’en Yi's government, although they went to considerable lengths to exculpate him personally. It was his policy to give control to his subordinates of what had been Japanese private as well as public enterprises. If he didn’t know what they were doing, he was incompetent. If he did know, he was a partner in corruption, however low a share he took for himself. Moreover, the record of corruption, including extensive trading with the enemy (then, Japan) while governor of Fujian makes Lai's attempt to isolate him from the rampant corruption on his misrule of Taiwan implausible.
Besides minimizing Ch’en Yi's responsibility for undermining the economy and social order, Lai et al. waxed lyrical about the hardships of “mainland officials who had arrived on the island with the sincere intention of reuniting the two societies [but] became frustrated and bitter” at Taiwanese lack of sympathy for the rigors of “public service”: “Life in a semi-tropical environment required adjustment, and officials, most of whom could not bring their families, experienced loneliness and frustration” (p. 95). Of course, being posted to someplace distant from one’s family was an essential feature of traditional Chinese governance. Moreover, Japanese officials seem to have adjusted to the semi-tropical environment, although Japan is north of the birthplaces of most of the KMT officials who fled to Taiwan during the 1940s.
Despite having acknowledged the substantial mismanagement of the economy, the rampant corruption and misrule that were undermining the rule of law that had characterized the Japanese era, Lai et al. at no point questioned the legitimacy of KMT rule of Taiwan. They judged Ch’en Yi and many of his officials as “honest” and “sincere” (though not revealing their metric for the unusual political science task of gauging "sincerity") . They see the officials they know to have been extremely corrupt and completely indifferent to the consent of the governed as unjustly maligned by Taiwanese (in the 1940s and since). Ch’en Yi and his government would have been wiser to have proceeded differently in the authors’ view, but Taiwanese should have been willing to be expropriated for the struggle against communism on the mainland by some residual Chinese patriotism and some Confucian sense of duty to accommodate armed aliens. Lai et al. cseem to onsider this another factual rather than moral judgment.. They alsp seem to believe that the population of Taiwan owed the KMT obedience and should have ignored the mismanagement of economy and society Taiwanese experienced in 1945-47, but they nowhere have explained why they believe this. Nor did they identify any point at which they think that revolt is justified.
Only within the framework of a legitimate government can “sedition” be a “factual question” (p. 10). Lai et al. counterfeited objectivity within a circumscribed realm of legitimacy to argue that during the first days of March 1947 “demands escalated and took on a revolutionary character is indisputable” (p. 99). Again on p. 102, the self-styled "objective" social scientists note that because some of the “demands would have in effect ended the sovereign authority of the ROC in Taiwan, they can be called ‘revolutionary.’” Their own chronology shows that the 32 Demands of the Taipei Resolution Committee made on 7 March (two days after Chiang Kai-Shek had dispatched troops to crush the rebellion) were withdrawn on 8 March (before the troops arrived) and belies their conclusion (on p. 177) that the increasing radicalization of dissident demands) caused the central governments’ shift from conciliation to repression).
Although Lai et al. took great pains to plaster the category “revolutionary” onto some Resolution Committee proposals, they adamantly refused to characterize what happened as a “revolution.” They do not want to veil what happened between 28 Feb. and 8 March 1947 as merely an “incident,” but they also do not want to accede that there could have been a Taiwanese revolution.
Although they do not approve of the amount — or, at least, the indiscriminateness — of the terror that followed the arrival of reinforcements for the garrison army, Lai et al. maximized estimates of the Chinese casualties in the first days of March and minimized estimates of the Taiwanese casualties beginning in the early hours of 9 March 1947. Note their use of the passive in the following: “Killings occurred, trials were conducted, people involved in the recent Uprising were imprisoned and in some cases innocent people were persecuted” (p. 151). Just as Lai et al. did not hold Ch’en Yi responsible for the conduct of his government in 1945-47, they exculpated Chiang Kai-Shek and his commanders for the massacres beginning with the landing of troops in Keelung 9 March, “spray[ing] the wharves and street with gunfire, shooting anybody on sight” (p. 156), before hunting down those on lists of potential opponents. Lai et al. claim fatalities were "several thousand," though Chen Kuan-Zheng's modeling of fatalities based on disappear ances of names from household registries and expected deaths from natural causes raised estimates of fatalities to 100,000 and included a conservative estimate of between 18,000 and 28,000.
No more than the corruption of ROC officials on Taiwan, could the conduct of ROC troops have been a surprise to Chiang Kai-Shek or to Ch’en Yi, for “the tactic of shooting indiscriminately at people and houses had long been used by KMT troops and warlord armies on the Mainland when putting down opposition” (p. 156). Lai et al. repeated without questioning Ch’en Yi's claim that “he had not anticipated the vindictive behavior of the troops” (p. 178), and wrote that “Chiang Kai-shek and Ch’en Yi could not have been expected to control those divisions and regimental commanders and officers who rounded up and shot unarmed citizens, secretly disposed of their bodies, and strafed residences and shops” (p. 161).
Considering that Ch’en Yi requested the troops and that Chiang Kai-Shek dispatched them, this is one of the most peculiar statements in the entire book. The Governor General and the President/Generalisimo may not have issued specific orders to gun down unarmed civilians upon landing, but both have to have known that this was more than likely and to have expected it. (FInally, in February 2003, Lai acknowledged this.) Someone issued specific orders to seize “revolutionaries” in subsequent days. Lai et al. did not trace the origins of these lists (nor is there any evidence they made any serious effort to do so), however, and guidance of this systematic roundup of purportedly “disloyal” intellectuals cannot be attributed to rowdy troops that had just landed.
Chiang Kai-Shek and Ch’en Yi were in command and responsible for what occurred. It is a matter of fact that they did not issue orders against the conduct that Lai et al. acknowledge was standard operating procedure for ROC troops—conduct that would constitute war crimes in international conflict and are arguably the same kinds of genocidal "crimes against humanity" for which former Yugoslavian president Milosevich is being tried in the Hague.
Although they are fully aware that Ch’en Yi requested reinforcements and Chiang Kai-Shek decided to send the 21st Division on 5 March 1947, Lai et al. repeated Chiang’s disingenuous rationale of 10 March: “Last Friday, March 7, the so-called Feb. 28th Incident Resolution Committee unexpectedly made some irrational demands. . . ” (p. 147). Demands made on 7 March were irrelevant to what had been decided two days earlier. Such a public statement provides dubious “pinpointing” of what was significant in Chiang’s decision on (or before) 5 March. Taking after-the-fact public pronouncements as adequate analyses of motives is a dangerous methodology for political science, all the more so for ones claiming to assess "sincerity." To claim that demonstrably anachronistic accounts “pinpoint” motivation is to participate in rather than to analyze an ideology and shows yet again that Lai et al. are apologists for the KMT rather than the objective scientists they claim to be.
The authors revealed their involvement in KMT ideology of the 1990s (again) in their trivialization of advocacy for independence by some Democratic Progressive Party leaders “because they lacked any other significant issue. . . to woo voters from the KMT” (p. 184). Along with their sponsor, Thomas Metzger, Lai et al. remain unwilling to take seriously that any Taiwanese (at any past or present time) seeks independence for Taiwan. Since the end of World War II, most places that were colonies before the war have achieved independence. Peoples suppressed for decades by Leninist regimes from the Baltic to the Pacific have struggled to establish independent states. Yet the purportedly objective social scientists who planned and wrote A Tragic Beginning were unable to conceive that anyone but gangsters and terrorists would challenge the legitimacy of the Leninist regime foisted on Taiwanese by the victors of World War II. To them, nationalism, “common in our century,” is reasonable if it is Chinese, but unreasonable if it is Taiwanese (p. 179). What could be more objective?
If the authors were genuinely concerned with making a contribution to political science rather than with minimizing the culpability of the KMT/ROC for the massacre of many thousands of Taiwanese civilians, one might expect comparison to other revolutions, successful or failed, or at least to comparison to other occurrences of urban revolts in Chinese societies.
A Tragic Beginning is not a contribution to a comparative science of politics. Although it marks an advance from absurd traditional KMT “explanation” of communist agitation as the cause of dissatisfaction in Taiwan in 1947 by acknowledging the incompetence and corruption of Ch’en Yi's administration, the book is still an attempt to exculpate Ch’en Yi and Chiang Kai-Shek. Despite claims to being “factual” and “objective” and not making moral judgments, Lai et al.’s underlying assumption that the KMT government was legitimate and that advocacy of independence is illegitimate is not a factual judgment nor a matter of science. The authors are either incapable of differentiating fact and value or misrepresenting what they are doing in the book that is based upon and filled with anti-democratic values. Whether one judges their neo-conservative, neo-Confucian values as moral or as immoral, their pretense of objectivity was fraudulent. Directly and indirectly—as employees of the then KMT-ruled ROC and of the Hoover Institution, to which the ROC has given considerable sums of money, whether or not any ROC funds were allocated specifically to financing the research and writing of this book— they were paid apologists for the Kuomintang and its fantasy state, the “Republic of China.”
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An earlier version of this review, coauthored by Keelung Hong, appeared in Typhoon. Western eyewitness accounts of KMT misrule and the 1947 include American George Kerr's Formosa Betrayed and New Zealander Allan James Shackleton's Formosa Calling.
The Stanford University Press seems to have a subspeciality in dishonest books about Taiwan. We took on another one, Margery Wolf's A Thrice-Told Tale.
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