Issues & Studies 37, no. 6 (November/December 2001): 77-106.

 

Chiang Kai-shek and the 28 February 1947 Incident:

A Reassessment

 

Gary D. Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley*

 

The objective of this research is to reconsider Chiang Kai-shek’s responsibility in causing and resolving the 28 February 1947 Incident (2-28) using a range of the new archive material now available to historians in Taiwan and to provide our own interpretation of the secondary literature on the Incident.  Moreover, we are concerned with reintroducing the relevance of agency into the early history of the Kuomintang’s (KMT’s) involvement in Taiwan, but to do so in a way that demonstrates the interaction of agents with structures.  To meet these dual objectives we identify areas of principal investigation that drive the study toward a detailed consideration of Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership style and political agenda: the interaction between Chiang and factions in Taiwan in 1947 which has been overshadowed by the simplicity of the Mainlander-Taiwanese dichotomy, and thus ignores the complexity of the crisis.

 

Keywords: Chiang Kai-shek; 2-28 (the 28 February 1947 Incident); Kuomintang (KMT); factions; Chen Yi

 

*   *   *

Dr. Gary D. Rawnsley (任格雷) is Lecturer in the School of Politics, and Director of the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham (UK).  He is the author of Taiwan’s Informal Diplomacy and Propaganda (London: Macmillan, 2000). (Note: Dr Gary Rawnsley is now Professor of Asian International Communications, University of Leeds.)

 

Dr. Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley (蔡明燁) has been Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, University of Nottingham, since 1999.  She has co-written with Gary D. Rawnsley Critical Security, Democratization and Television in Taiwan (London: Ashgate, 2001). (Note: Dr Ming-Yeh Rawnsley is now Senior Research Fellow, University of Nottingham and Visiting Research Fellow, University of Leeds.)

 

*The authors would like to express their gratitude to the British Academy which provided the financial support for this project.  The British Academy has also sponsored Ming-Yeh Rawnsley's presentation of this research at the American Association of Chinese Studies, October 2001.  For assistance in the research, the authors would like to acknowledge the help of Academia Historica (國史館) for granting access to the Tahsi Archives (大溪檔案); Professor C.L. Chiou (邱垂亮); and especially Professors Lai Tse-han (賴澤涵) and Huang Zhang-Jian (黃彰健) of Academia Sinica (中央研究院).

 

Introduction

The role and responsibility of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) in the 28 February 1947 Incident (2-28; 二二八事件) has always been viewed as a sensitive issue.  Several factors have contributed to this: one is the hesitation in ascribing blame for such atrocities to the man still considered by many as the savior of Taiwan, if not China.   In fact, a minor school of hagiography has ignored 2-28 altogether.  The proceedings of the Conference on Chiang Kai-shek, held in Taiwan in 1987, are a serious indictment of the lack of academic objectivity about Chiang in the years following his death in 1975.[1]  In five volumes—and one devoted to Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan—2-28 is not mentioned once.  Instead, we are treated to purple prose that has few roots in historical fact.  One contribution by Chen Che-san (陳哲三) provides a vivid description of Chiang’s death:

 

When he left the world, suddenly the wind began to blow in gusts, lightning flashed, and the rain began to pour down.  To most Chinese people, the man passing away with the wind and lightning was not just their chief of state but also their sagacious mentor.  On the next day, “from populous cities to remote villages in the mountains or by the sea, every part of the island had been immersed in deep mourning.”[2]

 

Without providing any supporting evidence, Professor Chen then states that the “majority of those who knelt down to weep for Chiang’s death are Taiwanese.”[3]  In light of the history of Taiwan since 1947, with divisions between “Mainlander” (大陸人 or 外省人) and “Taiwanese” (台灣人 or 本省人) providing a source of political confrontation left unresolved until the 1990s, difficult is to be this sanguine about the depth of popular affection for Chiang.  Nonetheless, such history reflects how, until the early 1990s, the government of the Republic of China on Taiwan, together with an alarmingly uncritical academic community there, successfully maintained a favorable picture of Chiang Kai-shek.

However, a more critical explanation for the absence of any comprehensive discussion of Chiang’s role in, and responsibility for, 2-28 is that an extraordinary amount of archive material remains closed to scholars, suggesting that Taiwan remains nervous of what researchers may uncover about Chiang.  The authors were promised that the so-called Tahsi (or Chiang Kai-shek) Archives (大溪檔案 or蔣中正總統檔案) would reveal much of what has remained hidden for the past fifty years.  We were, however, disappointed to find that the Tahsi Archives did not include anything that we did not already know or had not already been published in other investigations of the Incident.  Hence, we were both heartened and a little apprehensive to discover that there are now 200,000 more pieces of archival evidence relating to 2-28 stored at Academia Historica (國史館).  Such collections often defy logic; relevant documents are scattered far and wide among a number of libraries, archives, and even private collections, and are not stored in any chronological or even thematic order.  Sometimes, the same material appears in different places with different dates stamped on them to frustrate the most battle-hardened researcher.  A considerable number of Chinese-language studies have been published—bookshops in Taiwan usually devote a whole section to 2-28—but none have tried to access new primary documents, and therefore none provide a comprehensive, objective, and critical analysis of Chiang Kai-shek’s role.[4]

Explanations for 2-28 have avoided both complexity and controversy.  Some hold the governor of Taiwan, Chen Yi (陳儀), singularly responsible.  Such writers from different disciplines, traditions, and backgrounds as John Copper,[5] F.A. Lumley,[6] and the former American diplomat George Kerr[7] have demonized Chen Yi as an unprincipled tyrant who cared little for Taiwan.  Others have analyzed the 2-28 Incident from a structural approach emphasizing its “inevitability” given the deep- seated resentment of the Kuomintang (KMT, 國民黨) in Taiwan and the impending disaster of the civil war in China.[8]  Even Kerr, the most vociferous critic of the regime, chooses to remain silent on the possibility that Chiang Kai-shek bears some responsibility for 2-28.  The 1992 official report, however, concludes that while Chen Yi must be held directly responsible for the Incident, Chiang Kai-shek must bear his own share of blame as President of the Republic.[9]  The idea of Chiang’s ultimate responsibility concurs with the text of the 2-28 Monument (二二八紀念碑碑文) in Taipei:

 

Governor Chen Yi asked for the dispatch of troops from Nanjing (南京).   The chairman of the Nationalist Government, Chiang Kai-shek, without conducting a thorough investigation, responded by sending troops to Taiwan to crack down [on the protestors].

On March 8, the 21st Division of the army (第二十一軍, 即整編二十一師) landed. …  As the troops moved down to the southern part of Taiwan, they began to shoot indiscriminately. …  Within a few months, the number of deaths, injured, and missing persons amounted to tens of thousands. …  It was called the February 28 Incident.[10]

 

Weeks later, the bodyguard of Chen Yi revealed to a press conference in Taipei that Chen had received a telegram from Chiang ordering him to suppress any and all opposition: “Kill them all, keep it secret.”[11]  We have no way of verifying the historical accuracy of this allegation.  The bodyguard claimed he was instructed to pass the telegram to General Ke Yuan-fen (柯遠芬), the commander-in-chief of the armed forces stationed in Taiwan, i.e., the notorious Taiwan Garrison Command (TGC, 台灣警備總部).  The telegram itself has not turned up, though it may be among General Ke’s private papers.[12]

For the protestors who assembled around the 2-28 Monument in February 1996, such issues of historical detail had little relevance, for they had already decided who was to blame for the Incident.  An effigy of Chiang, draped in a banner that read “Prosecuting the 2-28 Murderer” and already battered by the sticks that many in the congregation had armed themselves with, expired in a plume of smoke.  In Taiwanese folklore at least, Chiang Kai-shek’s legacy was secure: he was little more than a butcher and a barbarian.  Difficult is to accept that these were the people who, according to Chen Che-san, wept profusely when Chiang died.  Many theories abound about why the 2-28 Incident happened and who was to blame.  Even the Chinese Communist Party (中國共產黨) offered an interpretation, as suggested by the following statement issued at a forum to commemorate the event in 1975:

 

Twenty-eight years ago, in February 1947, the patriotic and anti-imperialist Taiwanese people heroically rose up.  They were inspired by the great leader, Chairman Mao, who had just declared that the people should welcome the high tide of the Chinese Revolution.  Moreover, the Taiwanese people were influenced by the entire nation’s revolutionary victories at that time.  This action of the Taiwanese people shocked the reactionary ruling clique of Chiang Kai-shek and linked up with the revolutionary struggle of the Chinese people.  The 28 February uprising was part of the New Democratic Revolution under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.[13]

 

Clearly, history belongs to its interpreters.

The objective of the present research is to hack away the trees and see the wood: to reconsider Chiang Kai-shek’s responsibility in causing and resolving 2-28 using a range of the new archive material now available to historians in Taiwan and provide our own interpretation of the secondary literature on the Incident.  Moreover, we are concerned with reintroducing the relevance of agency into the early history of the KMT’s involvement in Taiwan, but to do so in a way that demonstrates the interaction of agents with structures.

To meet these dual objectives we identify areas of principal investigation that drive the study toward a detailed consideration of Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership style and political agenda: the interaction between Chiang and factions in Taiwan in 1947 which has been overshadowed by the simplicity of the Mainlander-Taiwanese dichotomy, and thus ignores the complexity of the crisis.  Chen Ming-tong[14] (陳明通) and Chen Cui-lian[15] (陳翠蓮) have done most to recover this important subject and demonstrate that the retrocession of Taiwan introduced to the island’s political culture an unprecedented level of factionalism.  The intricate nature of politics at this time suggests that 2-28 was as much about power struggles among Mainlanders as it reflected seemingly irreconcilable differences between Taiwanese and Mainlander.  A full picture of Taiwan’s political landscape would demonstrate how factions with overlapping ethnic composition lined up against each other.  So, for example, factions within the KMT allied with factions that represented Taiwan’s indigenous elite to oppose the strength of the Chen Yi-led faction (that itself included many prominent islanders; see below).[16]  This complexity is suggested in the memoirs of one Taiwanese factory-owner, Wu Zhuo-liu (吳濁流), reminiscing about Taiwan’s situation in 1947:

 

Among the Mainlanders, there were some who were satisfied with their positions and others who were very disappointed, and these two groups fought with each other.  Even among the returned Taiwanese, there were some who were satisfied and others still bitter.  These groups quarreled with each other.  The most serious problem was that [Chen Yi’s] government and the KMT were opposed to each other and could never agree on anything.[17]

 

From the outset of Taiwan’s retrocession to the Republic of China, factional politics endured and dominated Chiang’s style of leadership.  When Chiang appointed Chen Yi as governor of Taiwan, he discovered that Chen intended to appoint members of his own faction to prominent positions within the administration.[18]  Chiang passed the list of names to Chen Guo-fu (陳果夫), the leader of another faction that was close to the Generalissimo.[19]  Chen Guo-fu advised Chiang to ensure that Chen Yi appointed more KMT cadres and members of factions associated with Chiang. [20]  At the very least, Chiang should make sure Taiwan’s administration included personnel committed to the KMT, and that he should closely monitor Chen Yi and the officials he recruited.[21]  Moreover, we will suggest that it is possible to explain the contradiction in written instructions from Chiang in Nanjing to Chen Yi in Taipei—that troops should exercise self-restraint and not engage in “revenge activities”[22]—and how the troops actually behaved, leading to the notorious White Terror (白色恐怖) period, with reference to factions.

The present study also aims to consider the context of the crisis in more detail than previous studies: What else was happening in China at the time of 2-28 that might lead us toward a more rational explanation for Chiang Kai-shek’s behavior?  A cursory glance at the catalogue of Tejiao dang’an  (Special Documents 特交檔案) for the February-April 1947 period, stored in the Tahsi Archives at the Academia Historica, reveals that Chiang Kai-shek was preoccupied with a variety of problems at the time of 2-28.  These included both issues that deepened the civil war with the Chinese Communists, but also a number of political challenges, meetings with Chinese and foreign dignitaries, and related affairs that are otherwise trivial, but nevertheless impose on the time and energy of any president.

These questions refocus the research agenda on Chiang’s style of leadership, motivations, and method of making decisions.  Does Chiang’s reaction to 2-28 suggest that the party structure had collapsed and that he was no longer able to make careful decisions based on considered advice?  Alternatively, does Chiang’s style of leadership demonstrate that the bureaucratic style of politics he had engineered, with Chiang playing interests against each other, actually did more harm than good?  Chiang was careful to cultivate loyalty among his subordinates, but never allowed any to enjoy his absolute trust.  After all, many had yet to prove their unconditional loyalty to him, and many had joined with him for pragmatic reasons rather than commitment to his cause.  One such person was Bai Chong-xi (白崇禧) who had begun his career as a warlord (軍閥) in Guangxi Province (廣西省) when he challenged the Nationalist Government in armed conflict.  Like other warlords that confronted Chiang during the Northern Expedition (北伐), Bai “had to be defeated or bought off.”[23]  Chiang knew that in politics, one seldom buys friends; one merely rents them.   The 2-28 Incident clearly demonstrates his hesitation in trusting the small number of advisers that coalesced around him, and his tendency to play one faction off against another.  Is this attributable to Chiang Kai-shek’s style of leadership, or is this characteristic symptomatic of authoritarian government?

 

Context

The governor of the Taiwan Provincial Administration and head of the Taiwan Garrison Command (a dual position which concentrated both political and military power) was Chen Yi, a trusted general who, like Chiang, graduated from a Japanese military academy with a reputation for ruthless efficiency.  A participant in the Northern Expedition of 1924-25, Chen had acquired his reputation following the capture of Shanghai (上海) in 1927.  Kerr believes that this “placed [Chiang] in great debt to Chen.”[24]  In 1932, Chen suppressed a rebellion of the 19th Route Army (十九路軍) in Fujian (福建) and thereafter was governor of that province.  Chen responded to riots and unrest in Fujian in the same way that he would later deal with 2-28—with brute force.  Kerr goes on to claim that Chiang’s appointment of Chen was “one of the revealing and fateful decisions in Chiang’s career.  In mid-1945, Formosa was a clean slate as far as the Nationalist party was concerned. …  The key to the future of Formosa lay in the choice of personnel to fill the top ranks of the new administration.”[25]  Lumley concurs with this assessment: “So far as the history of Taiwan is concerned the major error the Generalissimo made was to appoint General Chen Yi as the first governor of Taiwan in 1945.”[26]  Thus, so far as Chiang was responsible for Chen’s appointment in the full knowledge of his record for violence in previous positions, Chiang does bear a share of the liability for 2-28.

Lumley believed that “Chen Yi seems to have known little and cared still less about the Taiwanese.”[27]  This is only partially correct.  Although Chen was a key member of the committee convened to restructure the government of the island following the Japanese surrender (the so-called Taiwan Investigation Committee), he was chosen because he was also considered an expert on Japan.  Chen might have cared little about the island, but he did know something about Taiwan from previous visits to the island.  The problem was that he disregarded Taiwanese interests and chose to respond to their requests and grievances in a decidedly provocative manner.   For example, his style of government meant that he became blinkered to Taiwan’s growing misfortunes:

 

Like most provincial governors, Chen Yi stayed at his desk, conferred with this staff, and did not often attend social gatherings.  He rarely toured the island or associated with the Taiwanese elite. …  Chen Yi seemed oblivious to the rapid economic deterioration, the growing social violence, and the deep social, cultural, and ethnic tensions that increasingly beset the cities.[28]

 

Chen spoke only in Mandarin, the national language that he believed would unite China, and never learned any of Taiwan’s local dialects, thus widening the distance between the provincial government and the people.[29]  Chen’s attitude toward Taiwan reflected the opinion of many Chinese at the close of World II: the island was a provincial backwater teeming with collaborationists, and contaminated by the half century of Japanese colonialism.[30]  Chen clearly misjudged the Taiwanese, however.   Lumley has, for instance, presented a critical assessment of Chen’s administration: “Chen Yi, who from the start conveyed an impression of pompous arrogance, became hated in a matter of weeks as no Japanese governor had ever been hated. …  Chen Yi put the clock back half a century to the last days of the Manchu rule when the mandarins could still impose their ruthless squeeze on the unfortunate islanders.” [31]  Many wondered why Chiang Kai-shek who had fostered the idea of Taiwan’s retrocession for so long, abandoned the island to a man who cared so little for such a goal.[32]

Perhaps a more useful line of inquiry to pursue is why we should expect Chiang Kai-shek to have been concerned with Taiwan and with the problems in Chen Yi’s administration.  After all, the Japanese had occupied Taiwan since 1895, although the island remained relatively untouched by both World War II and the civil war against the Chinese Communists.  In addition, the situation on the mainland was improving through 1945 and 1946, and any thoughts that the government of the Republic of China might have to retreat to Taiwan were not seriously entertained.  We glimpse a sense of Chiang’s optimism from his diary entries that describe the first meeting of the National Assembly (國代大會), December 1946:

 

The National Assembly, which met for the first time yesterday, is one of the most difficult undertakings in the history of the revolution, an epoch-making event …  With the convening of the National Assembly, the year-long Communist conspiracy to isolate our party and to subject the Nationalist government to attack from all sides has failed.[33]

The diary likewise records that Chiang was pleased with the constitution adopted by the National Assembly that went into effect on December 25.[34]  The problem for Taiwan was that Chen Yi insisted the constitution did not extend to the island: apparently, Taiwan was not yet ready for the kind of government promised by the National Assembly.  Instead, Chen Yi resolved to treat Taiwan as a separate entity from the rest of China, a decision that merely further antagonized the Taiwanese, many of whom were denied posts in the administration in favor not just of Mainlanders, but of the defeated Japanese.[35]  Christopher Hughes has been precise in his summation of these decisions.  Such “supercilious arrogance,” he notes, was “hardly likely to consolidate feelings of loyalty to the new regime.”[36]  Moreover, the “general style of Chen’s administration was that of victor over the vanquished rather than that of liberator,”[37] a view amplified in the official report on 2-28 that described how “many Taiwanese felt that the government treated them as colonial subjects.”[38]  There are suggestions that Chiang had explicitly instructed Chen Yi to administer Taiwan as a separate political and economic entity, [39] although as of yet there exist no means of verifying the accuracy of this claim.[40]

With the structure of China’s government in place, Chiang could turn his attention to the more urgent matter of destroying the Communist forces.  Again, there were grounds for optimism.  From July to December 1946, Nationalist victories steadily mounted,[41] and Chiang was certain that the enemy would be easily defeated or isolated by the end of the year.[42]  Dick Wilson has provided a lucid account of the civil war by the end of 1946: “Nationalist troops appeared to be on the verge of a successful campaign to recover all of Manchuria.  Their troops far outnumbered Lin Biao’s [林彪].”[43]

Were the Nationalist victories hollow?  There are suggestions that Chiang’s victories in 1946 and early 1947 were part of a grand strategy designed by Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Zhou Enlai (周恩來) to “not only delude but also to get Chiang Kai-shek—an astute politician but a lamentable war strategist—to mobilise more of his armies, closeting them. …”[44]  Mao is reported to have said: “We shall arrange a great triumph for him. …  We should let Chiang’s brilliant General Hu Zong-nan [胡宗南] capture Yenan [Yan’an延安].  The day Hu’s crack troops enter the emptied city will be the day of his defeat.”[45]  Mao’s grand idea was to pin down Hu and his 300,000 men, thus “removing one of Chiang’s main forces from other war theatres, where the real ‘peaches of victory’ were to be plucked.”[46]  If indeed Mao and Zhou had designed such a strategy to defeat the KMT, there were signs of its success in the first two months of 1947.  With increasing setbacks for the Nationalists in Manchuria, the end of overt American aid to the KMT following the failure of the Marshall mission, and the Communist push southwards along the strategically important Qingdao (青島)-Jinan (濟南) railway, hardly surprising is that events on the mainland overshadowed events on Taiwan.  On March 1, Chiang added to his workload in Nanjing when he became the temporary premier of the ROC following the resignation of Song Zi-wen’s (宋子文, better known as T.V. Soong).[47]  By July 1947, half of the KMT’s territory in Manchuria was lost, two-thirds of the railways had been abandoned, and the KMT’s strength had been cut in half by desertion and battle:

 

By 1947 the government’s military leadership was in incredible confusion, and the rate of turnover in the important field commands soared to a new high. …  The ministry of defence and the supreme staff were disrupted, there was no continuity in the field commands, and everywhere there was uncertainty, confusion, and stalemate. ...

With no sure hand on the helm, the entire Nationalist Army was rendered incapable of aggressive and coordinated offensives against the communists. …

Against the government forces, the communists launched their divide-and-conquer tactics in the north, dispersing them and then devastating them through successive offensives against [KMT] troops weakened and demoralized by mismanaged allotment of supplies and material.[48]

 

The context is important for it lends credibility to the claim that Chiang was easily persuaded that 2-28 was part of the civil war and had been instigated by Chinese Communist agents on the island.  While difficult is to accept that Chiang was as preoccupied with Taiwan as he suggested in his communications with Chen Yi,[49] wanting the governor to “report every morning, afternoon, and evening,”[50]</