February 28 and Anti-Government Uprisings (Plus Hundreds of New Planets)

Today is February 28, which is a holiday here in Taiwan. It commemorates the uprising against the KMT government that took place in 1947. The KMT, which at the time still controlled much of China (though it was soon to lose it to the Communists in the renewed civil war), had only taken over Taiwan in 1945, after the Japanese surrender to the US-led Allies at the end of World War II, under which they were compelled to surrender their possessions outside Japan. Though most Taiwanese initially welcomed the KMT, they soon proved to be corrupt and often treated the Taiwanese as if they were all untrustworthy. Resentment built up, and when an altercation on the evening of February 27, 1947 resulted in a police officer shooting and killing a local, a mass protest began the next day. More shootings by the government turned it into a full scale uprising (unfortunately, some innocent "mainlanders", i.e., people from China, were attacked in the process). Many local KMT governments around the island were forced out and local people set up self-governing councils. The KMT initially promised to meet many of the Taiwanese people's demands, but within a few weeks, Chiang Kai-shek ordered troops from the mainland to be sent over. They violently suppressed the rebellion, slaughtering large numbers of Taiwanese. During the subsequent White Terror period, which continued after Chiang and the rest of the KMT government was forced to flee to Taiwan from China after they were defeated by the Communists), many more people were arrested and executed, often due to accusations of involvement in the 1947 uprising, and the uprising became a forbidden topic. Only many decades later, after Taiwan democratized, could the incident be freely discussed. The government issued an apology and made February 28 a holiday, but it never made a serious attempt to investigate the incident to reveal which individuals were responsible for the atrocities that took place. This failure to secure real justice through finding out the truth means that the incident is still a divisive issue. This is yet another example of the importance of finding out and teaching the true historical facts, as I discussed recently.

Coincidentally, while in Taiwan we look back to a past uprising against the government, a more successful uprising took place just this past week in the Ukraine, with the pro-Russian Ukrainian President Yanukovich being forced to flee and the pro-European forces taking over. This has to be counted as a good thing, since both the opposition and the European Union that they lean toward are more progressive than Yanukovich and his autocratic Russian ally Putin. Of course it must be recognized that there were some extremists among the protestors and that the opposition politicians are not without their faults, though it seems unlikely that they are as corrupt as Yanukovich. In any case, it is perhaps telling that Yanukovich's attempts to violently suppress the protests ultimately caused even many in his own party to abandon him. On the other hand, the crisis is not over, not least because some areas in the eastern part of Ukraine, particularly the Crimea, are pro-Russian. Personally, I think Ukraine should at least consider letting the people of the Crimea vote on whether they want to stay in Ukraine or join Russia (rejoin, really, as the area was part of Russia prior to the 1950s). I don't think any national borders should be considered inviolate, though I realize that if every little area was allowed to vote separately on which side to join it could result in a rather messy map, not only in this situation but in other similar ones. In any case, we can only hope that the crisis is solved peacefully and results in an overall reduction in autocracy, corruption and human rights violations in the region – in other words, that the results are rather different from those of Taiwan's February 28 uprising.

On a completely different topic, I have to mention another exciting news item: the recent announcement of the discovery of over 700 new planets orbiting stars other than the Sun. While there don't seem to be any exact analogues of Earth – that is, planets the size of Earth orbiting at a similar distance from their star – in this batch of planets (the discovery methods and our available technology still tend to favor planets that are very close to their stars, very large or both), there are many Earth-sized planets orbiting close in to their stars and a few larger planets that may be in their stars' habitable zones. Taking into consideration that these planets were found in a search area that is a tiny fraction of the whole galaxy and that the search methods used could only discover planets whose orbits are edge on toward us, the discovery of such a large number means that there is a vast population of planets out there in the galaxy, and there are bound to be quite a few Earth twins. As I have noted in the past, with sufficient effort and a bit of luck, we may find such a planet in the next few decades.