Today is February 28th, the 60th anniversary of the "228 incident" -- the flash-point for a series of riots in Taiwan that resulted in brutal waves of reprisals by the Nationalist government. Wulingren quotes an almost 60-year-old article from the Nation:

On the afternoon and evening of March 8, without warning or provocation, the streets of Keelung and Taipei were cleared with gunfire to cover the entry of mainland troops. These reinforcements consisted mainly of the Twenty-first Division, a Szechuan outfit with a reputation for brutality. In the next four or five days more than a thousand unarmed Taiwanese in the Taipei-Keelung area alone were massacred. A year and a half earlier many of them had joyously welcomed the arrival of the Chinese troops. Now truckloads of soldiers armed with machine guns and automatic rifles shot their way through the streets. Soldiers demanded entry into homes, killed the first person who appeared, and looted the premises. Bodies floated thick in Keelung harbor and in the river which flows by Taipei. Twenty young men were castrated, their ears cut off, and their noses slashed. A foreigner watched gendarmes cut off a young boy's hands before bayoneting him because he had not dismounted from his bicycle quickly enough. The radio advised students who had fled from the city to return to their homes, but when they did so they were killed.

60 years later, the Taiwanese have not forgotten the horrifying incidents and the years of repressions that followed. The primary political fissure in Taiwan is not between left and right but between blue and green -- those who consider Taiwan Chinese versus who consider the Chinese the enemy. Even though both sides now acknowledge 228 as an awful tragedy, the topic have festered for too long to disappear anytime soon. Every February 28th is 228.