Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Rioting quickly spread to other Taiwanese cities, and within a day or
two many mainlanders were in hiding, frightened at the specter of
widespread ethnic violence on the island. The newly appointed
Nationalist leader of Taiwan was concerned enough about the precari-
ous situation to send urgent appeals to Nanjing for military assistance,
and when Nationalist military forces arrived in response in early
March there was a general bloodbath throughout much of the island.
Order was restored through sheer brute force and terror. The violence
poisoned intercommunal relations between mainlanders and islanders
for decades, and ethnic harmony on the island has been a hotly
emotional issue ever since.
George H. Kerr, an American who lived in Japan and Taiwan before
World War II, was an Assistant Naval Attach
´
assigned to Taiwan at
the war's end, and in 1947, as a Foreign Service Staff officer and Vice-
Consul, he was an eyewitness to the February 28 massacres in Taiwan.
His topic Formosa Betrayed, first published in 1966, is a classic for its
portrayal of the Kuomintang's brutality in Taiwan, and his chapter
“The March Massacre” contains vivid eyewitness accounts of the
violence following February 28 in Taipei:
Nationalist Army trucks rolled slowly along the road before our house,
and from them a hail of machine-gun fire was directed at random into
the darkness, ripping through windows and walls and ricocheting in
the black alleyways
...
From an upper window we watched Nationalist soldiers in action in
the alleys across the way. We saw Formosans bayoneted in the street
without provocation. A man was robbed before our eyes—and then cut
down and run through. Another ran into the street in pursuit of soldiers
dragging a girl away from his house, and we saw him too cut down.
This sickening spectacle was only the smallest sample of the slaughter
then taking place throughout the city, only what could be seen from one
window on the upper floor of one rather isolated house. The city was full
of troops.
(Kerr, 292-93)
Uneducated Nationalists seemed to have had it in for Taiwan's intel-
lectual and economic elite. “The ignorant warlord mistrusts the
'clever' intellectual,” Kerr observed (Kerr, 300).
Tan Gim, Columbia University graduate, banker, and head of a large
trust company was taken from a sickbed and done away with. The
Min Pao editor, LinMou-sheng, another Columbia University graduate
and former professor of the English and German languages, was
dragged naked into the night and not heard of again. Gan Kin-en,
