Drifting away

ON THE last day of February, Taiwan remembered its dead. The dead in question were those killed in the February 28th incident (some say massacre) in 1947, when the island's native Taiwanese re belled against the corrupt and venal regime of a government from Chiang Kai-shek's China, which had only recently taken over the island from a defeated Japan. Mainland troops brutally quelled the unrest, after which security police purged anyone even suspected of disloyalty. Up to 28,000 people died; many more were jailed and tortured. Relations between Taiwanese and “mainlanders”--including those who two years later followed Chiang Kai-shek into exile--have remained poisonous ever since.