Must Zhongzheng fall?

Quentin Stevens and Gabriele de Seta

City, 2020, vol. 24, issue 3-4, 627-641

Abstract: Taiwan’s thousands of statues of former dictator Chiang Kai-shek have encountered varying fates since Taiwan’s democratisation in 1987. Citizens have iconoclastically pulled down or beheaded numerous Chiang statues. Many have been removed from public view to the rural grounds outside his temporary mausoleum. Those that remain standing are regularly defaced with paint and slogans highlighting Chiang’s crimes. A more carnivalesque denigration of Chiang is university students secretly redecorating several campuses’ statues on significant historical dates, particularly 2/28, when the dictatorship bloodily suppressed a 1947 uprising. These costumes metaphorically critique Chiang, portraying him as a blood-sucking mosquito or ghoulish Halloween pumpkin. Graduating students at Taipei’s elite high school playfully transform its centrally-placed Chiang statue into an Oscar statue, an astronaut, and film characters. These redecorations parody the commemorative statue genre, implying such objects’ triviality and interchangeability. The paper explores these critical, humourous actions as forms of e’gao, a predominantly-online mode of hilariously parodying pop culture, crossing over to address difficult built heritage. A different set of responses to Chiang’s statues also reflect Taiwan’s democratic pluralism. Not everyone wants to see them removed or defaced. A social media community is dedicated to cleaning their neighbourhoods’ Chiang statues after 2/28. A 10-metre-high statue of Chiang, with its massive Memorial Hall and honour guard, remains among Taipei’s leading tourist attractions. Taiwan's Ministry of Culture has given this statue temporary heritage protection, and is exploring ways to recontextualise its meaning. Democracies respect such heterodoxy toward the past; they allow different actors to respond differently.

Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1080/13604813.2020.1784593

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