EDITORIAL: Whose history is it, anyway?

Academia Historica director Chen Tsui-lien (陳翠蓮), speaking at the handover ceremony for her new role on Monday, said that when she accepted the position, she knew that her peaceful life as a history professor was a thing of the past, and that from now on she would have to “wear a helmet.”

A specialist in Taiwan’s post-World War II history and the 228 Incident, she has been accused of being politically divisive. A phrase she used in her acceptance speech set headlines alight this week, putting her in the sights of editorials in blue-leaning media.

She said opposition figures calling for a “dangwai (outside the party) alliance” were appropriating the language of the democratic movement that opposed to the past authoritarian Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime.

Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕), who had called for an “opposition alliance,” was particularly angered. She said that an opposition alliance was a perfectly appropriate aspect of democratic politics, and objected to the use of the term dangwai.

It is important to understand the political and historical context of the term. It runs to the very core of why Chen’s appointment is contentious, and why she will to need that helmet.

“Dangwai” refers to the opposition against the KMT regime during the period of martial law when opposition parties were forbidden. The movement gave rise to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

When President William Lai (賴清德) originally approached Chen about taking on the role in June, he asked her why it is that, three decades into the democratic era, divisions run so deep, and why so many Taiwanese are still unaware of their own history, still believing the account written under the political indoctrination of the authoritarian era.

Her academic expertise aside, Chen brings personal experience to the tensions between historical subjectivity and indoctrination. In an article titled “Life Under Martial Law: The Miseducation of a Party-State Youth” published in The Reporter in July 2017, Chen related her experiences of growing up under martial law, how she had been indoctrinated by the education system into a form of personality cult of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and how she had fully bought into the authoritarian regime’s version of history.

It was only following the 1979 Formosa Incident, also known as the Kaohsiung Incident, when authorities cracked down on members of the dangwai movement, leading to the murder of the mother and two daughters of democracy activist Lin Yi-hsiung (林義雄), that she began to doubt what she had been taught, she said.

Historical truth is crucial. Chen setting her goal as the promotion of Taiwanese history from a Taiwanese perspective is to be applauded. Unfortunately, her replacement of Lu’s term “opposition alliance” with “dangwai alliance” has opened her to accusations of partisanism, because it implicitly equates the targets of her criticism with any party that is not Lai’s DPP. While Chen criticizes the extreme partisanship of the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party and their accusations of authoritarism against Lai and the DPP, her comment has given, in the opposition’s eyes, the very justifications that she wishes to dispel.

Editorials in blue-leaning newspapers are already making allusions to George Orwell’s Party slogan from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four that “who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past,” or accusing Chen of wanting to exclusively preside over the historical account of a political party.

Academia Historica was established in Nanjing, China, in 1947 and relocated to Taiwan in 1957. The official Web site says that it is “dedicated to researching and preserving the rich heritage of the nation’s and Taiwan’s history,” making a distinction between the two.

One of the editorials said that Academia Historica is the archive of the Republic of China, and not a “Taiwanese independence propaganda mill.” It asksed: When Chen thinks of “national history,” which country’s history is it, anyway?

None of this makes sense without understanding the unique nature of a country that has yet to adequately undergo the process of transitional justice. However, at least it is the question Lai posed when he approached her for the role.