1947 February 28 Incident
Hung-I Ho
The February 28th incident was a historical anti-government uprising in Taiwan. The uprising was violently suppressed by the government, which is nationalist government. The problem all started from a single dispute between a cigarette vender and an officer of the Office of Monopoly. The officer simply hit the vender with a gun and made him bleed, rebellion soon started and continued for few days because they couldn’t suffer anymore hardship from the government. The military and police kill thousands of civilians. The incident left a huge scar in every person, destroyed lots of family and influenced this beautiful island country.
This incident happened before I was born, but it talks by the people around me all the time. It really made me dig into the truth of everything. After I got into school and started to learn the history, the lessons that talked about the incident happened that day. When teacher told us about the story she was pretty clam. She was saying that this is a fact that won’t change but she didn’t talked much about it. The fact is thousands of people got killed and the teacher never talk about this. It made me angry, because they were hiding the truth. I became interested in history subject because I want to know the truth. Because I knew the story could be different by the way it was presented to people. Till these days different news channel have the different perspective on this incident. It makes me became talkative and love to talk to people on the street to know their perspective. I want to know how story became differently between the book and the stories were talked by the people on the street. I knew the contemporary writer wrote down the story by their acknowledgement, but often their aspect were twisted by the administration. The truth is more important for me. When I’m watching the news, I don’t believe what they said is truth.
The suppression killed thousands of people; some children lost their parents on those days. The atmosphere in the country had changed, from peaceful to horrible. People locked themselves in the home, afraid that the government would come to catch them. After the new government controlled the island and the incident occurred everything became different. The tension between government and people remained for a long time. People locked their home because the governor and police officer levied the things you have for no reason. Also family wants their children go home early, to make sure they’re safe. People started worried that a small mistake they make is going to cause them big trouble, the reasons are the different understanding between mainlander and native people in Taiwan. Even till these days, my grandparents still remind me the tough days they had suffered. They told us not to get into bad relationship with people, especially when people have different views than me because we might end up insulting them. We know discussion is better than argument. Once we make the society in chaos, the people will have conflict all the time.
