bloody incident, which changed totally the relationship between the natives of Taiwan and the Chinese from the mainland, has been well recorded; and so only the role Chiang Kai-shek played in the tragic incident is dealt with in this column. Chiang, who would be elected president shortly, received reports on the incident from his administrator-general of Taiwan Chen Yi. Chen was a general and doubled as commander of the Taiwan garrison command. But he had no troops of his own. While Chiang was ruling the whole of China, many of his generals commanded their own divisions that obeyed their orders rather than those of the generalissimo, who nominally was commander-in-chief of all the forces. Chen Yi was not one of such generals. He reported the riots after the killing of a bystander by a Taiwan Tobacco and Monopoly Bureau agent were planned and organized by the Chinese Communists.
Those were fabricated reports, however. No Communists were involved in the spontaneous riots, though they tried to take advantage of the incident to attempt an overthrow of the Chen Yi administration and liberation of Taiwan. Chiang, who was busy trying to suppress what he called a Communist rebellion in the Chinese civil war, believed General Chen Yi and granted the latter's request to send reinforcements to Taiwan with a warning that no retaliation against the innocent people of Taiwan would be tolerated. Chiang's Kuomintang chapter chairman in Taiwan sent a similar report.
As Chen Yi lacked forces to cope with a 2/28 incident settlement committee, headed by Taiwanese leaders, the islanders were in the ascendancy or in control throughout the island by March 5. Two days later, the committee demanded that the Taiwan garrison command be abolished and all Taiwanese "war criminals" be released at once. Among the war criminals or Taiwanese collaborators with the Japanese was C. F. Koo, the late business tycoon and chairman of the Straits Exchange Foundation, a semi-official organization charged with the conduct of non-official relations between Taiwan and China. The demand was considered an act of sedition and was so reported to the generalissimo.
On March 8 Maj. Gen. Chang Mo-tao, commander of the Fourth Gendarme Regiment, visited the settlement committee in Taipei and guaranteed that Chiang's government in Nanjing would dispatch no troops to Taiwan and take no military action against the island. After dark, however, transport ships docked at Keelung and discharged over 10,000 troops. More than 3,000 others landed at Kaohsiung simultaneously.
It was these troops who, with the help of the gendarmes, started the island-wide massacre in violation of Chiang's order to take retaliatory action. Keelung was the first city "pacified" by the government force on that day.
The SET TV cable network, commissioned by the Government Information Office, produced a doctored documentary about the pacification of the north Taiwan port city earlier this year in celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the 2/28 Incident, the "chief culprit" of which President Chen declared was none other than Chiang Kai-shek.
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