The February 28 Incident and National Identity

The 1945 Retrocession to China ended fifty years of Japanese rule, soon followed by the February 28 Incident of 1947. This event is perhaps the most important single event in Taiwanese history because it made Taiwanese history thinkable. ¹ The betrayal and violence of the Chinese Nationalist government made the boundaries of a distinct historical subject, "the Taiwanese people," clear and compelling. This collective imagination would ultimately write the exiled Mainlanders into its own story, (over)turning their Chinese nationalism into a chapter of Taiwanese history. This discursive inversion, however, was neither sudden nor inevitable. The relationship between the February 28 Incident and the solidification of Taiwanese identity and national sentiment should not be thought of as cause and effect, because this kind of mechanical historical sufficiency masks the connection between the event and its interpretation and narrative production. I would like to offer an expanded sense of the event that draws these processes into the fold of its own history, a telling of the February 28 Incident history that shifts our attention from seemingly permanent things to "the processes whereby permanence and thingness are achieved" (Herzfeld 1997, 57).