Taiwan Transitional Justice

30-second overview: In 1950, a twenty-year-old from Qingshui, Taichung was arrested because an acquaintance listed his name under interrogation. He spent ten years on Green Island, then went on to found Taiwan's first children's comics magazine. He lived to ninety-three, spending his final years asking the same question: "Who exactly killed my friends?" Taiwan's transitional justice process vacated convictions for nearly six thousand people — but it never answered his question.

On September 10, 1950, Tsai Kun-lin was sitting at home in Qingshui, Taichung, when a stranger came to visit. That visitor was later arrested; Tsai's name appeared in the confession. Without any trial, KMT security agents imprisoned the twenty-year-old on Green Island.

He stayed there for ten years.

In 2023, Tsai Kun-lin died at ninety-three. In his later years, when interviewed by the media, he did not speak of his own grievance — he spoke of a question: "I want to know: who exactly killed my friends?"¹ Many of his fellow inmates on Green Island never made it out alive.

It took Taiwan thirty years to formally establish an institution to advance transitional justice, and another four years to dissolve it. How many answers were found in that process, and how many questions remain suspended in mid-air — that is what this article sets out to trace.

The Architecture of Authoritarianism: Who Built It, How It Worked

To understand the difficulty of Taiwan's transitional justice, one must first understand how deep the system that needed to be reckoned with had gone.

The 228 Incident occurred in 1947 — a large-scale suppression of native Taiwanese by mainland Chinese troops — with estimated death tolls ranging from several thousand to twenty thousand, a figure still disputed today.² Two years later, the martial law era formally began: on May 20, 1949, the Taiwan Provincial Garrison Command declared martial law, a state that persisted for thirty-eight years until it was lifted on July 15, 1987. Thirty-eight years — the longest-running martial law of the twentieth century worldwide.³

The legal basis for the Taiwan White Terror was the Punishment of Sedition Act and the Temporary Provisions Against Communist Spies During the Period of Communist Rebellion. Anyone deemed suspected of "sedition" or being a "Communist spy" could be tried by military court without normal judicial procedure. The "Taiwan Transitional Justice Database" later established by the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) contains records of more than fourteen thousand people subjected to political verdicts⁴ — among them, cases in which Chiang Kai-shek personally intervened in sentencing number more than three thousand, with 876 entries for death sentences.⁵

The final estimated total of White Terror victims, as confirmed by 2022, stands at more than twenty-two thousand.³ But the words "as confirmed" are themselves a problem — before the TJC began organizing the archives, even estimating this figure was difficult.

Four Decades of Silence: Lifting Martial Law Is Not the Same as Reckoning

In 1987, the lifting of martial law was widely celebrated across Taiwan's society. But lifting martial law only removed the emergency decree — it was not the beginning of political reckoning.

The Punishment of Sedition Act was not abolished until 1991; the old Article 100 of the Criminal Code (criminalizing thought) was not amended until 1992. And the National Security Act passed in 1987 still contained a provision stating that final verdicts of military courts during the martial law period could not be appealed or protested. This effectively locked the outcomes of White Terror trials in a legal vault, making the rehabilitation of victims impossible until the twenty-first century.

💡 Did you know
Taiwan's first formal government apology after the lifting of martial law came only in 1995, when Lee Teng-hui apologized to the families of 228 Incident victims on behalf of the government, passing the Act for Redress of the 228 Incident and establishing the 228 Memorial Foundation. Legislation for compensation related to the White Terror followed a few years later — but compensation is one thing, accountability is another. Taiwan did only the former.

The silence after martial law had structural causes. Wu Nai-de, a researcher at Academia Sinica's Institute of Sociology, offered three explanations in his papers: Taiwan's democratic transition was led by the KMT ("peaceful revolution" model), which retained political legitimacy even after democratization; the later authoritarian period's economic achievements led many to see Chiang Ching-kuo as a contributor rather than a criminal; and by then, the political repression had receded so far into the past that perpetrators were either dead or old.⁶

After the first party alternation in power in 2000, "transitional justice" began to enter public vocabulary. But during the eight years of the Chen Shui-bian administration, substantive progress remained quite limited, staying largely at the symbolic level — renaming streets, pulling down statues in isolated actions, without a systematic legal framework.

The Act and the Commission: An Institution Thirty Years Overdue

In 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party captured both executive and legislative power simultaneously, and legislation for the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice finally moved forward. Even so, the process was not smooth: the KMT vigorously obstructed it in the Legislative Yuan, even filing a constitutional petition. The Act finally passed its third reading on December 5, 2017, defining the "period of authoritarian rule" as running from August 15, 1945 to November 6, 1992.

On May 31, 2018, the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) was formally established — the first unit in Taiwan's history to advance transitional justice under the name of a state institution. Subordinate to the Executive Yuan, it had a statutory lifespan of two years; after two extensions, it was formally dissolved on May 31, 2022, having existed for 1,460 days.⁷

The TJC ran into crisis from the start. In September 2018, recordings were released revealing the vice chairperson Zhang Tianqin attacking opposition figures in an internal meeting. The TJC was publicly ridiculed as an "East Factory" (referring to a feared secret police organ of the Ming dynasty), and both the chairperson and vice chairperson subsequently resigned. This opening set the TJC working throughout its term to establish credibility.⁸

⚠️ Contested viewpoints
The TJC's political situation was perpetually caught from both sides: for the Blue camp (KMT), it was a "tool of political settling of scores"; for some pro-independence voices and victims' families, it lacked force and evaded accountability for perpetrators. Taiwan Statebuilding Party spokesperson Li Zhao-li told the BBC that "many of the elites who were attached to the one-party system in the authoritarian era were still able to make a comeback in the democratic transition."⁹

The TJC's Four Years: What Was Done, What Was Not

1. 2018/05/31 — TJC officially established; first chairperson Huang Huang-hsiung takes office
2. 2018/10/04 — First wave of vacated convictions announced: 1,270 individuals
3. 2020/02/26 — Taiwan Transitional Justice Database goes live; Chiang Kai-shek's intervention in verdicts disclosed publicly for the first time
4. 2021/03/30 — First batch of 25 unjust sites officially designated and announced
5. 2021/03/27 — Fifth through seventh waves of vacated convictions; cumulative total 5,942 cases
6. 2022/02/22 — Second batch of 17 White Terror unjust sites announced
7. 2022/05/31 — TJC formally dissolved; tasks transferred to various ministries

Restoring Judicial Wrongs: The Most Concrete Achievements

Over its four-year term, the TJC vacated a total of 5,983 convictions³, including those from the well-known Formosa Incident, the Luku Incident, the May 20 Farmers' Movement case, and the Taiyuan Incident. This was the most clearly progressing part of the TJC's mandate, because the legal basis for an administrative agency to vacate judicial verdicts had been established, and each wave of vacations had a public ceremony and a list of names.

Yet "vacating convictions" and "finding out who put them in prison" are two different things. The former, Taiwan accomplished; the latter was almost entirely left undone.

Political Archives: Opened and Still Closed

The TJC reviewed 6,306 political-case archives held by state agencies, and also reviewed 7,572 political-case archives among KMT party assets.³ These included "president's endorsements" — documents personally annotated by Chiang Kai-shek, in which one can see his handwriting changing prison sentences to death sentences.

But this process was filled with resistance. The KMT claimed there were "no further archives to report," and the TJC ultimately discovered that large quantities of "Taiwan Provincial Party Branch" archives remained inside the party that had not been transferred — including valuable materials related to the 228 Incident, personnel transfers between party and government organs, and the seizure of party assets.

Authoritarian Symbols: The Difficulty Behind the Numbers

The TJC surveyed authoritarian symbols throughout Taiwan (primarily statues of the two Chiangs and named spaces), ultimately tallying a total of 1,546 statues/sites. By the time of dissolution, the proportion removed or dealt with by central government agencies was 27.05%, and by local county and city governments, 26.74%; counting those that had agreed to be disposed of, the combined national total was approximately 33.2%.³

In other words, more than two-thirds of Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo statues remained untouched as of 2022.

The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, the most visible case, saw several workshops held by the TJC during its term, some exhibition spaces altered, and before dissolution, a recommendation submitted calling for a transformation into a "Democratic History Memory Museum" paired with a "Reflecting on Authoritarian History Park."⁷ Whether the statue is removed remains unresolved to this day, the question handed off to the Ministry of Culture to advance.

📝 Curator's note
One detail illustrates the complexity very well: the Chiang Kai-shek statues removed from around the country were largely gathered together and sent to Cihu in Taoyuan, where they now form a "memorial sculpture park" — a popular tourist attraction. The gray zone between removal and preservation is fully exposed in that park.

Unjust Sites: Past Wounds Transformed into Public Spaces

The TJC announced a total of 42 unjust sites across two batches³, including Jingmei in New Taipei City (White Terror Memorial Park Jingmei), Green Island in Taitung (White Terror Memorial Park Green Island), and the Ankang Reception Center in Taipei. The Ankang Reception Center is particularly precious because it has been preserved in its original state — it was the site of political interrogations in the authoritarian era, and walking inside one can still feel the oppressive spatial design of that time.

The National Human Rights Museum, subordinate to the Ministry of Culture, continues to operate exhibitions at the Jingmei and Green Island sites, and has built the "National Human Rights Memory Database" and "Unjust Sites Database," both publicly accessible.

The Unsolved Problem: Where Are the Perpetrators?

When the TJC dissolved, it left behind a final task report totaling 1.77 million Chinese characters. It recorded vast numbers of victims' stories, and the workings of the authoritarian system. But one thing remained blank at the end of the four-year term: individual accountability for perpetrators.

This is not a problem unique to Taiwan, but Taiwan's situation has its own particularities.

East Germany, after reunification, established a Stasi-style records agency (the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the Former German Democratic Republic), allowing German citizens to access records of their own surveillance; information on more than 170,000 citizens who had served as informants became public.¹⁰ The TJC exchanged knowledge with the Stasi Records Agency, but Taiwan never passed a comparable "lustration law" — a mechanism for the systematic vetting of former authoritarian collaborators in public office.

South Korea's experience is closer to "pursuing accountability to the end": the suppressors of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, including former presidents Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, were prosecuted in 1995 following democratization and sentenced in 1997 to death (later commuted) and life imprisonment, respectively.¹¹ Taiwan's chief political oppressor, Chiang Kai-shek, died in 1975 and is beyond any legal reckoning; but the others within his system — military judges, intelligence officers, informants — the overwhelming majority have never been publicly named to this day.

✦ "Not prosecuting the accomplices of former regimes is a grand reconciliation with criminals; in the end, the murderers remain among us." — German writer Ralph Giordano (1923–2014), cited in a Taiwan Yungshe commentary series¹²

This sentence appears in materials cited by researchers on Taiwan's transitional justice law — and the irony is that Taiwan's transitional justice did indeed move in that direction.

How Much Transitional Justice Is Enough?

This is a question Taiwan's society continues to debate, with camps on different sides dissatisfied for diametrically opposite reasons.

The voice saying "it's already enough, even excessive": Represented by the KMT, which holds that the TJC was a political instrument of the DPP, that the achievements of the authoritarian era (such as the "Taiwan Economic Miracle") should not be written off, and that Chiang Kai-shek still ranks in multiple polls as "the president who contributed most to Taiwan."¹³

The voice saying "it is far from sufficient": Civil human rights organizations, victims' descendants, and some scholars point out that Taiwan's transitional justice always had "victims but no perpetrators" — lustration law was never passed, party asset handling is opaque, Chiang-related spaces still exist in large numbers, and the education system's account of authoritarian history remains contested today.¹⁰

A third voice — that the framework itself is the problem: Some scholars (such as National Taiwan University political science professor Cheng Chih-yung) point out that Taiwan's transitional justice became excessively partisan, turned into an extension of the Taiwan independence and unification battlefield, and dragged measures that could otherwise have built consensus into identity politics.

The UN's 2010 "Transitional Justice Guidelines" divided the work into five dimensions: prosecuting perpetrators, realizing the right to know the truth, restoring victims' rights, institutional reform, and national dialogue.¹⁰ Taiwan has done relatively well on "victim compensation" and has a database available for "knowing the truth," but on "prosecuting perpetrators" and "institutional reform" (especially education), substantial work remains unfinished.

⚠️ Contested viewpoints
After the TJC's dissolution, transitional justice work was taken over by the Executive Yuan's "Transitional Justice Promotion Council" and various ministries. Critics worry that the dispersed handover will cause highly politically sensitive work to lose momentum — especially because "perpetrator identification and accountability" was transferred to the Ministry of Justice, which is not independent of political pressure. The TJC's last acting chairperson Yeh Hung-ling said in May 2022: "The score is for the public to give."¹⁴

The [Sunflower Movement](/en/society/sunflower-movement/) and the Generational Connection to Transitional Justice

One interesting timing is worth noting: Taiwan's transitional justice legislation moved forward precisely in the political landscape that emerged after the 2014 Sunflower Movement. The Sunflower Movement changed Taiwan's political map, making the DPP's total electoral victory in 2016 possible — and the Act on Promoting Transitional Justice was passed only after that total victory.

The Sunflower Movement's core issues were sovereignty and democracy, but it was also a generation's response to the authoritarian inheritance — a resistance to a political system dominated by a party that had transformed from the old party-state apparatus. In some sense, transitional justice was the institutional outlet for this generation's sense of historical debt.⁷

But Zheng Nan-rong's story reminds us that this road is longer than anyone anticipated. In 1989, Zheng Nan-rong self-immolated to resist a KMT arrest warrant, becoming a martyr for freedom of speech in Taiwan. Thirty years after his death, Taiwan established a formal institution to advance transitional justice. Thirty-four years after his death, that institution has already been dissolved, and the justice he envisioned remains incomplete.

Curator's Note: A Project with No End

📝 Curator's note
Transitional justice has a standard definition in academic discourse, but in Taiwan it has always been a word occupied by living politics. Before every election, it transforms from historical work into an electoral weapon, exhausting those who genuinely want to go deep into it.

The question Tsai Kun-lin asked at ninety-three — "Who exactly killed my friends?" — is not a question that can be answered with statistical figures. What it requires is a society willing to say clearly: in that era, who did what, and for what.

The true difficulty of Taiwan's transitional justice is not that the documents cannot be found — it is that society has not yet reached consensus on "what happens after we say it clearly." Rehabilitating victims: most people agree. Holding perpetrators accountable: there the consensus fractures.

That fracture may be harder to deal with than the statues themselves.

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