Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the 228 Incident

For them, 2-28 is a great fracture in the heart of Taiwan which prevents the Taiwanese from fully realizing their identity as Taiwanese. In this way, 2-28 is a source of on-going frustration. From its bitter legacy and an inability to fully accommodate its remembrance, it is an event that many believe still stands in the way of Taiwan’s national development.

Except 2-28 is remembered. There is a veritable library of writing on it; there are public memorials, a national day of remembrance. The actual events are now well-known, and in substance, if not in detail, unequivocal. Yet, both Mr Lin and Mr Yang lament the division in Taiwanese society that 2-28 created, and are concerned that Taiwan remains a society divided from itself, divided from the possibility of its own unity and coherent identity. There is a sense with 2-28, therefore, that however much remembrance occurs it is never enough. 2-28 continues to have an urgent impetus that seems at odds with its presence in contemporary Taiwan.

The continuing concern over 2-28 raises the question then of what is it really about. Is the debate about 2-28 in 2007 merely a symptom of a larger crisis about the make up of a Taiwanese identity.

In 1987, the historian Yin Zhangyi wrote in China Tribune of an identity crisis in Taiwan, drawing on the work of Erik Erikson and his notion of a “complex”. So Taiwan had a “Taiwan complex” and a “China complex”, which was related to a failure of development in a psychoanalytic sense. Taiwan had not “matured” as a nation and resolved its neurotic complexes.

Between 1988 and the early 1990s, 2-28 itself became a mainstream issue. Newspaper editorials which dismissed 2-28 as “just the memory of old people” in 1988, by 1991 were calling, as now, for the event and its legacy to be written into Taiwanese history in order for Taiwan to become “normalized” as a nation. Similarly, in 1992 the sociologist Chang Mao-kuei called for zhengming, the rectification of the name of “Taiwan” to stabilize and normalize Taiwan’s political and social relations. Shortly before his inauguration in 2000, President Chen Shui-bian described an “identity confusion problem” (rentong cuoluan wenti) and called for its resolution as part of national development.

In 2007, the Taiwanese are still making the same appeals. Taiwanese identity has always been out of reach or unrealized, existing only as the promise of a wholly Taiwanese future.

I wonder then, if this is not the very nature of Taiwan’s identity itself. For twenty years, it has been constituted out of the appeals to the possibility of its future. The Taiwanese nation is in a state of being invoked, summoned, or conjured spectre-like by Taiwanese politicians, academics, commentators and cultural practitioners.

Even the driest political analysis in Taiwan becomes such an appeal. The surveys of identity, where people are asked to name themselves as “Taiwanese” or “Chinese” produces a narrative of the nation. The “Taiwanese” line goes up, and it seems as if the nation itself is closer to coming into being, it goes down and the nation seems to be dissolving before our eyes.

In Ackbar Abbas’s notion of a déja disparu he proposed that Hong Kong had an identity which became visible just at the moment of its disappearance at the Hong Kong handover to China in 1997. Hong Kong’s identity was expressed as nostalgia for an identity which Hong Kong never knew it had.

Taiwan’s history has its own dividing date – 1987, and the lifting of martial law. From then on, instead of nostalgia for an identity which had never been, Taiwan’s identity has become an appeal to the possibility of an identity which is yet to be – a singular, naturalized, unifying Taiwanese identity.

And yet, as Mr Lin and Mr Yang have shown, Taiwanese people are acutely aware of the problems of identity-making. In their comments, they are debating openly the very mechanisms with which their own identity might hope to be conjured. Therefore, even as the Taiwanese appeal to the need for an active cultural and political process for the creation of that singular identity, they are unravelling its very possibility in their self-conscious exposure of its political and ideological mechanisms. As a result, Taiwan has been addressed by the Taiwanese as an object in suspension, a self-conscious and self-reflexive act of (re-)writing of the possibility and imperative of identity itself.

Perhaps, then, the time has come for the Taiwanese to pause in their appeals, their impassioned statements of aspiration for unity and singularity which are needed to “save Taiwan”. Maybe the Taiwanese should let Taiwan be. Taiwan has always had an identity. It had an identity the moment there was a name for the island. Nowadays, when we foreigners visit “China”, everyone knows what we mean. We do not mean “Taiwan”, and maybe for now that is enough.