Commemorating the Dead

Chapter 3 explores the treatment of martyrs in various exhibitionary spaces in Taiwan. KMT forms of martyrdom are on display at the Taipei Martyrs Shrine (忠烈祠‎), which commemorates soldiers and political figures who sacrificed their lives for Nationalist causes (e.g., the 1911 Revolution and the suppression of Communists in the 1940s) in a mode that resonates with Confucian forms of martyrdom and that serves as an emotional hook for the sinocentric narrative of Taiwan history. The other two spaces discussed here—the Taipei February 28 Memorial Park and Memorial Museum (二二八和平公園和紀念館‎) and the National February 28 Memorial Museum (二二八國家紀念館‎)—commemorate martyrs of a very different sort: those who died at the hands of the KMT during the February 28 Incident of 1947. These martyrs bolster a nativist view of Taiwan history and identity.

Chinese Asianism in the Early Republic: Guomindang intellectuals and the brief internationalist turn

Until recent decades, historians of modern East Asia generally considered Asianism to be an imperialistic ideology of militant Japan. Although Japanese expansionists certainly used the term and its concept in this way in the 1930s and 1940s, earlier proponents of Asianism looked upon it as a very real strategy of uniting Asian nations to defend against Western imperialism. Showing that Chinese intellectuals considered different forms of Asianism as viable alternatives in the early days of the Republic of China, this article examines a number of discussions of Asianism immediately following the 1911 Revolution. Concentrating on newspaper articles and speeches by intellectuals Ye Chucang and Sun Yat-sen, I show the international aspirations of the Guomindang elite at this crucial point in the construction of the Chinese nation. Despite the dominance of discourse on the nation state, these intellectuals advocated different Asianist programmes for strategic purposes within the first two years of the Republic, dependent on their very different relationships with Japan.