Bonus Episode: 2-28: A Bad Beginning

In this special episode, we hear Eryk reading from chapter five
of John’s “Taiwan in 100 Books.”  The topic is
2-28, an event named after a date: February 28, 1947. It’s
usually referred to as the February 28 incident, but
sometimes called the 2-28 Massacre. American vice-consul at the
time George Kerr used the term “the March massacres,” which gives
a more accurate impression of what happened; the brutal
suppression of uprisings and protests throughout the country,
which left perhaps 20,000 dead. It was a bad beginning to ROC
rule on Formosa, a dark stain that was
a taboo topic until the early 1990s. Listen and
learn about George Kerr’s “Formosa
Betrayed”(1965), probably the most important
English-language non-fiction work on Taiwan. We also
cover the first English-language White Terror novel, “A
Pail of Oysters” (1953), by Vern
Sneider, and Allan James
Shackleton’s “Formosa Calling” (1998),
an account of 2-28 which took four decades to get
published.