Is it? Chiang Kai-shek cemented his place in Chinese history for fighting alongside Sun Yat-sen against the military junta instituted after the fall of Qing. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong then led China through the Japanese invasion.
His place in Chinese history is undoubtable. You shouldn't need to be perfect to be remembered.
I don't think you should be perfect to be remembered, I think you should at a bare minimum not also be known as "The Butcher of Shanghai" to contemporary historians.
He put down an anti-government uprising by slaughtering 18,000 people. "Not perfect" is an understatement.
They didn't call his military dictatorship in Taiwan "The White Terror" because Chiang Kai-Shek was an imperfect guy
Same argument could be applied to the people like Robert E. Lee who cemented their place in history. It's just that they happen to be on the wrong side of history just as Chiang Kai-shek is.
Having a place in history doesn't automatically mean they should be honoured. There's plenty of people from history that we can all agree have made a huge impact and yet we wouldn't want statues of them.
unlimited genocide on the memory of the white butcher of shanghai and taipei
Meanwhile Bandera statues ain’t going anywhere in Ukraine, nor in the US for that matter, nor in Canada: Canada Has a Nazi Monument Problem
The crackers howl and mald every single time someone even so much as floats the idea of taking down the statues of slave-owning confederates; so of course nothing's happening to the Bandera statues here.
Wouldn't it be the opposite, as article mentions ( erase his legacy and the historical link with mainland China.)?
also a deeply unpopular politician on the mainland so it's also a show of good faith
It’s complicated. Chiang Kai-shek was a historical adversary of the CPC and is viewed as a traitor and war criminal in the PRC. However, his nationalist party, the KMT, is alive and well in Taiwan. The CPC currently favors the KMT even though they were former adversaries because the KMT advocates for deepening economic ties to the PRC.
With this context I’m guessing the KMT’s primary opposition, the DPP, wants to highlight the KMT’s fascist legacy while also conflating the KMT’s and the CPC’s expression of Chinese nationalism. Making that false equivalency is easier because of the KMT’s interest in building stronger economic ties with the mainland.
Western media usually frames issues from the DPP’s perspective which would explain the commentary in the article.
Removing his statues could be seen as white-washing the KMT's history, but I doubt anyone in the PRC is actually mad about it like the article claims.
