Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Eric Chu/Facebook
COMMEMORATIONS IN TAIWAN regarding the 80th anniversary of the end of the Pacific War earlier this month have proven politically charged between the DPP and KMT. This may not be surprising, insofar as present-day concerns have been projected onto World War II, and Taiwan is sometimes discussed as a potential flashpoint for another global conflict along the lines of past world wars.
In particular, President Lai Ching-te of the DPP primarily used a statement on the anniversary, which was posted on social media, to criticize China. Lai stated that World War II showed the fate of countries that wage wars of aggression against other nations. Lai then called for democracies to stand together against such aggression, as they did eighty years prior.
In this vein, Lai also hit out at China’s claims over Taiwan. The PRC did not, after all, exist during World War II, nor has it ever controlled Taiwan. Lai attacked this as a “distorted” view of history in his speech.
Indeed, the DPP’s signaling regarding the anniversary was also clear in preceding commemorations for the end of World War II in Europe. Taiwan did not previously commemorate VE Day in such a high-profile manner. The move was probably aimed at shoring up ties with European countries at a time when Taiwan’s traditional reliance on the US faces the uncertainties of the Trump administration.
The KMT, perhaps unsurprisingly, hit out against the Lai administration’s commemorations. Specifically, the KMT attacked Lai over a perceived failure to criticize the actions of the Japanese empire.
Attacks by the KMT on the DPP over pro-Japan sentiment have been long-running. The KMT’s grudge against Japan returns to the Sino-Japanese War and Japan’s colonization of China.
Indeed, commemorating the end of World War II proves fraught political territory in Taiwan, seeing as Taiwan was a Japanese colony during the time. Taiwanese soldiers fought as part of the Japanese imperial army and Taiwan was firebombed by the US as a Japanese colony.
The KMT only arrived in Taiwan after the Japanese departed. But given the many decades of martial law that followed in the course of the period known as the White Terror, members of the DPP have sometimes looked upon the Japanese colonial period as a better time in comparison to the decades of authoritarianism that followed. Likewise, in contemporary times, when Taiwan faces geopolitical threats from China, Japan is a potential ally when it comes to defense.
Even so, the claims of the KMT are ironic, in that the KMT is critical of what it terms a lax attitude on the crimes of Japanese aggression. The KMT has, on the other hand, found no issue with making peace with another historical antagonist of it, that of the CCP.
The KMT fought a bloody civil war with the CCP, but today apparently is against the idea of peace with Japan while being for peace with China. To this extent, as party leader, Chiang Kai-shek was originally reluctant to fight with the Japanese and instead was more focused on combating the CCP. It took Chiang’s kidnapping by “Young Marshal” Zhang Xue-liang for Chiang to be convinced to temporarily ally with the CCP against the Japanese, for which Zhang spent most of his life thereafter as Chiang’s political prisoner, only released after Chiang Ching-kuo’s death. After the end of World War II, the KMT also retained Japanese military advisors in Taiwan in order to shore up political control and build up military power as part of efforts to retake China.
Again, given that Taiwan was actually part of the Japanese empire during World War II, conflict over commemorations for World War II reflects the contested nature of Taiwanese identity–both in terms of what Taiwan is, who Taiwanese are, and Taiwan’s relationship to China and Japan.
In this sense, that there are unaddressed issues over World War II, such as regarding Japan’s use of comfort women, see no solution or genuine redress–caught as they are in the conflict between Taiwan’s main political camps. Yet it is the case that commemorations of history are often more about the present than the past, and this is another example in point.