Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

For those who are concerned that the democratic Taiwan should continue to have the freedom to choose its own future, President Obama’s coming visit to Beijing brings back the memory of a regrettable episode during President Clinton’s visit to China in June 1998.

Early in the spring of that year there were signs that the American Government would assure China that the United States would not defend Taiwan if she declared independence. On March 13, Joseph Nye proposed in Washington Post op-ed eliminating ambiguity in the American position and by starting that the United States would not recognize or defend Taiwan, if it were to declare independence.

The decision to link the belated reopening of a national museum on the February 28th Incident of 1947 with the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Republic of China is likely to become a pretext for the sanitation of the role of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) in the most traumatic event in Taiwan's modern history.

The brutal suppression of a spontaneous uprising to protest the corrupt and incompetent rule of the rightist KMT regime shortly after its takeover of Taiwan in October 1945 after 50 years of Japanese colonialism cost the lives of over 10,000 Taiwanese, including many outstanding intellectual, political, legal and social leaders.