A day after writing my post February 28, it dawned on me that there was another way of thinking about The China Post‘s editorial on Taiwan’s infamous February 28 Massacre which was was a bit more sympathetic. My earlier post was predicated on the assumption that The China Post is a KMT newspaper. However, if one supposes that it’s actually a mainlander paper, then one can view what they wrote in rather different terms.
To start with, a quick background:
The population of Taiwan is composed of four major groups: Hoklos, Hakkas, mainlanders and aborigines. About 70% of the population are Hoklo – descendants of southern Chinese who migrated to Taiwan four or five hundred years ago. The feelings that this group has towards China are ambivalent, sometimes hostile. Another 10% are Hakkas, who arrived from the mainland about three or four hundred years ago. Roughly 20% are "mainlanders" – immigrants from China (or their descendants) who arrived in Taiwan after the KMT was defeated on the mainland. And finally, about 2% are aborigines related to Pacific Islanders. Numerically, economically and politically, aborigines are the least influential of the four groups.
With that explained, it is now possible to view the February 28 Massacre through two different lenses. On the one hand, it can be seen as a political conflict between the KMT party and the native Taiwanese. But on the other, it can be interpreted as an ethnic conflict between Hoklos and mainlanders.
The dangerous thing about thinking about 228 as an ethnic conflict is that doing so threatens to create rancor among ethnic groups, and may make future inter-ethnic conflict more likely. That of course is in no ones interest, least of all minority mainlanders. Wide-scale bitterness towards a political party can always be remedied by closing up shop or by the party renaming itself, which is what communist parties in the Eastern Bloc did after 1989. But your ethnicity is your ethnicity until the day you die. Hence The China Post‘s perfectly valid desire, as a mainlander paper, to ease hostility towards mainlanders.
Of course, The China Post is both a KMT AND a mainlander paper, so the analyses in BOTH this post and the previous post are partly true. My chief objection to The China Post‘s editorial was its suggestion that the Taiwanese should not only bury the hatchet, but sweep all their questions under the rug as well. It seems to me that if I were a mainlander, I wouldn’t want people to stop asking questions about the 228 Massacre. Instead, I would want to do all that I could to direct the blame away from mainlanders per se and onto the KMT of old, along with its former leader, now long dead.
But because The China Post is also a KMT newspaper, this is something we will never see.
