A Tragic Beginning

This book is getting a bit long in the tooth now as a lot of Taiwanese scholarship has been published on the 2/28 incident since it came out. It is remarkable for its unusual attempt to present the various arguments in a “balanced” way. The effect ultimately didn't really work out that way however.

I felt there was considerably more coverage of Taiwanese violence against mainlanders in the early stages of the incident than on the much larger scale of violence by the Chinese military in the oppression of the incident. Since more recent descriptions usually err on the opposite side however, this can complement other accounts.

I am not persuaded by their argument about the low number of security forces on the island compared to the Japanese being a reason for the scale of the incident. They clump Japanese military and security forces together and compare these numbers to security plus military forces of the Chinese. What they don't mention is that the numbers of police/gendarmerie remains almost constant into the postwar. Obviously if there had been more soldiers in Taiwan, the uprising may have been put down more quickly but since some of the worst violence by Chinese forces was carried out by Peng's forces already in Taiwan, it is not clear that it would have resulted in fewer deaths or less oppression.