On 19 February 1951, a state-sponsored funeral took place in north Taipei in which a splendid cenotaph to commemorate the “five hundred martyrs of Taiyuan”— heroic individuals who died defending a distant city in northern China against the Chinese Communist encirclement—was revealed. In the four decades that followed, the Nationalist government on Taiwan built a commemorative cult and a pedagogic enterprise centering on these figures. Yet, the martyrs' epic was a complete fiction, one used by Chiang Kai-shek's regime to erase the history of atrocities and mass displacement in the Chinese civil war. Following Taiwan's democratization in the 1990s, the repressed traumas returned in popular narratives; this recovery tore the hidden wounds wide open. By examining the tale of the five hundred martyrs as both history and metaphor, this article illustrates the importance of political forces in both suppressing and shaping traumatic memories in Taiwan.
Noble Ghosts, Empty Graves, and Suppressed Traumas
The Heroic Tale of “Taiyuan's Five Hundred Martyrs” in the Chinese Civil War
Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang
Poverty and Shame
Interactional Impacts on Claimants of Chinese Dibao
Jian Chen and Lichao Yang
implement the dibao system in rural China. A pilot project was launched in 1992 in Shanxi Province. In 2007, the central government enacted a document “to establish an overall dibao system in rural China” ( CCCPC and State Council 2007 ). Dibao policy
A megastructure in Singapore
The “Asian city of tomorrow?”
Xinyu Guan
shelves and shelves of prepackaged food products from specific locales in China—instant snail broth noodles from Guangxi, spicy tofu from Sichuan, pickles from Shanxi—arranged in no particular order; some of the products on the shelves were still in the
Ruth Mostern
sources that they consulted for precedent ( Will 1998: 300 ; Zhang 2009: 6 ). The loess was originally up to 300 meters thick across northwest Shaanxi 陝西, Shanxi 山西, and eastern Gansu 甘肅 provinces, and Figure 3 Timeline of erosion rates. Sedimentation