No need for red paint: Taiwan finds a fix to historical statue problem

Taipei: In a nondescript park, about an hour’s drive north-west of Taipei, Taiwan has fashioned a novel, if controversial, answer to the statue wars that have raged across many countries.

What should be done with the tributes to historically significant but flawed figures? Those whose legacies are essential to national foundations, but mired in the uncomfortable truths of colonialism, political repression and bloodshed, and targeted by vandals demanding a more honest account of the past?

Teacher Chen Si-Zhuang visits the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park, which houses statues of late leader Chiang Kai-shek.Credit: Daniel Ceng

Welcome to Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park, in the city of Taoyuan. It ostensibly pays homage to Taiwan’s first president, general Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled the island with an iron fist for decades under martial law as leader of its Kuomintang (KMT) government.

But the park is more of a statue graveyard. Some 200 bronze Chiangs have been deposited in its grounds with little fanfare since the late 1990s, many of them donated by schools and governments from across the island, amid a progressive-led push for tributes to the general to be purged from public spaces.

The result is a bizarre spectacle. Rows of near-identical busts of Chiang, his face bearing a slight beneficent smile, line a path that winds through the park. In one section, full-figure Chiangs have been arrayed together, like pieces on a chessboard, awaiting the first move.

About 200 statues of Chiang Kai-shek have been deposited at the Cihu Memorial Sculpture Park in Taoyuan, Taiwan. Credit: Daniel Ceng

Further afield again, a giant literary Chiang is ensconced in a chair, reading a book. One Chiang is horse-riding, another clutches his military cap in his outstretched hand.

These days, Chiang’s legacy is bitterly contested by those who laud him as an anti-communist hero and those who disavow him as a dictator. It is a debate fuelled by the deep political divisions between the modern-day Beijing-friendly KMT, as custodians of his legacy, and the ruling independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, which opposes his veneration.

There were just a handful of families strolling the grounds on a recent Sunday afternoon – the park is something of an afterthought to the grander mausoleum precinct a short walk away, where the generalissimo’s body lies entombed under guard.

“I grew up under Chiang Kai-shek’s education system. We glorified him back then,” says Lu, a 60-year-old fire safety worker, who was visiting the park with his wife and her elderly parents and gave only one name.

“As you grow up, you realise that not everything the KMT did was good – they had a negative side as well.”

The statues are part of history, he says, and should be preserved.

Taiwan’s government, led by the Democratic Progressive Party, has spearheaded a push to revisit Chiang Kai-shek’s legacy. Credit: Daniel Ceng

Weng Wanhsu, a 35-year-old graphic designer who was wrangling her three-year-old son, said she supported the idea of statues being consolidated in one place.

“That way the older generations can come here and worship them. But I don’t think we need to see them all across Taiwan,” she says.

In Sydney, the statue of Captain James Cook in Randwick has been vandalised twice in 12 months.Credit: Nick Moir

Chiang and his KMT army fled to Taiwan in 1949 after they were defeated by Mao Zedong’s Chinese communist forces in a civil war on mainland China.

As leader of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s formal name, until his death in 1975, Chiang set Taiwan on the path to economic modernisation. But he also oversaw the brutally repressive White Terror era – the name now given to the four decades of KMT rule as a one-party state until 1987, during which tens of thousands of dissidents were jailed and many executed.

On Friday, Taiwan will commemorate the “228 incident” or “February 28 incident”, when KMT forces quashed a citizen uprising in 1947 and massacred thousands, in a brutal crackdown that has come to be seen as the starting point of the terror. Statues of Chiang are frequently defaced by pro-independence protesters on this anniversary.

The KMT has since apologised for the crimes of the terror era, but it has resisted the DPP’s push to reassess Chiang’s legacy and remove symbols associated with his authoritarian rule, calling it a political witch-hunt. Taiwan still has hundreds of roads and dozens of schools named after the former leader, and his face is still featured on $1, $5 and $10 coins, and on the $200 banknote.

In the name of ending “the veneration of authoritarianism”, the DPP-led government in July axed the hourly changing of the guard ceremonies that were performed around a giant bronze statue at the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in central Taipei, a major landmark and tourist attraction.

It has also pledged to respond more quickly to calls to remove the remaining 760 statues of Chiang from public spaces, a key recommendation of a since-disbanded Transitional Justice Commission set up by the DPP.

“It’s kind of weird to remove all of them from public because it’s part of history,” says Cheng Si Zhung, 49, a primary school teacher who was visiting the park with her husband and teenage son.

“But it’s also the case that Chiang Kai-shek was overly glorified.”

Australia, too, is no stranger to the statue wars and the debate that accompanies calls for truthful historical accounting, as per the annual convulsion over January 26 and the semiregular defacing of Captain Cook statues.

In Taiwan, a relatively nascent but flourishing democracy facing an ever-present takeover threat from its aggressive neighbour, the stakes are high. A fight over the best way to grapple with its authoritarian past is entwined with an existential struggle for its democratic future.

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