228 Peace Memorial Day is a national holiday of profound historical significance in Taiwan. During the 2026 Lunar New Year holiday (16–22 February) and the 228 Peace Memorial Day, museums and historical sites across Taiwan associated with the era of martial law, the White Terror, and the 228 Massacre saw an unprecedented surge in visitors. At the National Human Rights Museum, for instance, official statistics indicate that visitor numbers during this year’s Lunar New Year holiday increased fivefold compared with the same period last year.
At the same time, the top five titles on real-time sales rankings at major online bookstores were all works related to Taiwanese history and Tâi-gí (Taiwanese-language) literature, suggesting that Taiwanese society is experiencing an unprecedented wave of what commentators have termed a collective “catch-up course in Taiwan’s history”.
Crime of the Century: The Lin Family Murders, 28 February 1980
The driving force behind this phenomenon—widely described as a “catch-up course in Taiwan’s history”—can be traced in part to the controversy surrounding a film entitled Crime of the Century. The film centres on the Lin Family Murders (林宅血案), one of Taiwan’s most notorious unsolved cases, which occurred in 1980.
The crime took place at the Taipei residence of lawyer Lin Yi-hsiung, who had been arrested in 1979 in connection with the Kaohsiung Incident (also known as the Formosa Incident). On 28 February 1980—while Lin was attending the first public session of his military trial—his home in central Taipei, which had long been under tight surveillance by state security and intelligence agencies, became the scene of a brutal massacre. Lin’s mother and his twin daughters were murdered inside the house, while his eldest daughter, only eight years old at the time, survived with severe injuries.
As the case remains unsolved to this day, it has become one of the most controversial mysteries in modern Taiwanese history and is often referred to as the “Second 228 Massacre”.
In February 2020, the Transitional Justice Commission (TJC) released an investigative report revealing that archival materials indicate the perpetrator used the Lin family’s telephone to make an external call during the incident. Intelligence authorities had reportedly obtained a surveillance recording capturing the suspect’s voice. However, further investigation by the TJC uncovered internal sign-off documents within the National Security Bureau suggesting that the recording of the call may have been destroyed shortly after the crime.
These findings highlighted the extent to which the investigation of the Lin Family Murders may have been seriously obstructed by the security and intelligence apparatus, deepening suspicions of possible state involvement during Taiwan’s authoritarian era.
In February 2023, Taiwan’s highest oversight body, the Control Yuan, issued an investigative report concluding that intelligence agencies—led by the Taiwan Garrison General Headquarters (台灣警備總司令部)—had formed a special task force that effectively dominated the judicial investigation. The report found that the task force repeatedly misdirected the course of the inquiry, while using the criminal investigation as a pretext to conduct unlawful surveillance of political dissidents and their families. It also disseminated misleading information and manipulated media and public opinion.
According to the Control Yuan’s findings, these actions constituted grave instances of state violence and serious misconduct within the judicial process.
Revisiting or Twisting the History
The controversy surrounding the film project has been further intensified by the family background of the director, Hsu Kun-hua (徐琨華). His grandfather, Hsu Mei-lin (徐梅鄰), once served as spokesperson for the Taiwan Garrison General Headquarters, where he was responsible for explaining a number of major incidents to the public, including the 1981 murder of Chen Wen-chen (陳文成), then Carnegie Mellon University professor. At the time, the authoritarian government led by the Chinese Nationalist Party (Zhongguo-Kuomintang; 中國國民黨) was widely believed to have made strenuous efforts to conceal the truth behind several such cases.
As criticism mounted, Hsu Kun-hua issued a public apology, acknowledging that his family background presents an undeniable historical contradiction with the Lin family massacre. He further conceded that overlooking his own lineage could in itself cause distress to the victims’ relatives.
The principal investor and screenwriter of Crime of the Century, Sam Su or Jing-Shyh Su (蘇敬軾), is another figure whose background has drawn attention. A Taiwanese-born businessman who built his career in China, Su rose to become President of Greater China at Yum! Brands in 1998 and later joined the company’s global board as Vice Chairman in 2008. In an interview with Chinese media in 2025, he publicly stated that he strongly identifies himself as a Chinese.
Su has previously ventured into politically themed filmmaking. In 2019 he financed The Shooting of 319, a film based on the 2004 assassination attempt that shocked Taiwanese society during the presidential election. The production claimed to reconstruct the truth through meticulous reasoning. However, without interviewing the principal parties — then President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and Vice-President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) — or presenting documentary evidence, the film portrayed former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) as the alleged mastermind, relying largely on speculative narrative. The film ultimately grossed only about NT$2.4 million at the box office, and the following year the entire production was uploaded to YouTube for free viewing.
In 2025, Su released Crime of the Century, a dramatization of the Lin family murders. The film did not adopt existing findings from Taiwan’s official investigations, nor did the production ever contact Lin Yi-hsiung or his family to seek consent. Its screenplay goes further, portraying the Taiwanese independence activist Sú-bêng (史明), who had been placed on the Chinese Nationalist government’s wanted list and lived in exile in Japan at the time, as the alleged orchestrator of the killings. In doing so, the film appears to recast what is widely regarded as a symbol of state violence into a narrative of internal power struggles within the opposition movement.
Although the producers have stressed that the film was intended “to present a chapter of Taiwan’s transitional history and help society better understand its homeland”, the fact that key figures such as Lin Yi-hsiung were kept entirely unaware during production has deepened scepticism. Given the controversies surrounding Su’s earlier film The Shooting of 319, as well as a distribution model that is difficult to explain in purely commercial terms, the project has inevitably provoked strong political associations. Some commentators have questioned whether such productions might serve particular political interests in shaping the interpretation of Taiwan’s past, potentially seeking to reshape — or even rewrite — the island’s collective historical memory.
Taiwan’s Real History: Have You Caught Up?
Since the press conference marking the completion of filming for Crime of the Century on 1 February sparked public debate, Taiwan has witnessed an unexpected surge of interest in reading its own history. A number of historical works quickly climbed the online bookstore bestseller lists, including A History of Taiwan for Young People (少年台灣史), A New Illustrated History of Taiwan (臺灣歷史圖說), The Path of Transitional Justice (轉型正義之路), Taiwan’s 400 Year History (台灣人四百年史), and the Tâi-gí (Taiwanese-language) poetry collection Ji̍t-hue Siám-sih (日花閃爍). By mid-March, with the addition of Last Will Undelivered (無法送達的遺書), six of the top fifteen bestselling titles were related to Taiwanese history — a reading phenomenon rarely seen before.
Younger generations are also finding new ways to engage with the past. The Kiōng-Seng Music Commemoration, organised by the Taiwan Youth Association for Transitional Justice and Kiōng-Seng (台灣共生青年協會) since 2013 to promote awareness of the 228 Massacre, is now largely run behind the scenes by young volunteers born after 2000. In Tâi-gí, the term “Kiōng-seng” denotes the notion of symbiosis or living in concert. It broadly describes a state in which two or more organisms, communities, or even ideas coexisting—deriving mutual benefit, or in a shared environment. As they put it: “None of us has ever heard the gunshots of 228, but we feel the ringing in our ears.” (我們沒有一個人聽過二二八的槍響，但我們感到耳鳴) This year, the National Human Rights Commission (國家人權委員會) participated for the first time as a supporting partner.
Commemorative institutions and the cultural sector have likewise responded. Large numbers of people have signed up for the “historical walking tours” organised by the National 228 Memorial Museum (二二八國家紀念館), whose organisers note that most participants are young people; on some days attendance has exceeded two thousand. Meanwhile, the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute screened four films related to White Terror for free during the 228 holiday period. These included the Taiwanese classics Super Citizen Ko (1994) and March of Happiness (1999), alongside the Argentine documentary El juicio (2023) and the Brazilian film I’m Still Here (2024). Through these cross-generational and transnational cinematic narratives, a broader public conversation has begun to unfold — one that reflects on historical memory and the continuing deepening of democracy.
Bridging the Parallel Realms: Truth, Reconciliation, and Solidarity
A key driving force behind this wave of “catching up on Taiwanese history” has been Janet Chia or Chia Yeong-chieh (賈永婕), the chairperson of Taipei 101. On 25 January, American climber Alex Honnold attempted a free solo ascent of Taipei 101, drawing international attention and praise. Chia, who courageously facilitated the event, was widely applauded in Taiwan. Her subsequent focus on the Lin family murders and her call for a “catch-up lesson in Taiwanese history” drew the attention of many people who had previously been indifferent to politics, including those not aligned with the Democratic Progressive Party.
Janet Chia comes from a “military dependants’ village” (眷村) background—communities formed by families who moved to Taiwan with the Chinese Nationalist Party after the Chinese Civil War. Such groups have often been associated with a strong Chinese national identity and, to a certain extent, an acceptance of the perceived necessity of the martial-law, and the party-state system. In other words, they tend to show comparatively less sympathy for those who suffered oppression during the February 28 Massacre and the White Terror (Taiwan), including political prisoners and dissidents subjected to repression under that regime. Politically, they have also often been regarded as a stable support base for the Chinese Nationalist Party. For this reason, her public reflection on Taiwan’s authoritarian past attracted particular attention.
Through widely used social media platforms such as Facebook and Threads, she shared her personal journey of re-examining Taiwan’s history. In her first post on 7 February, she wrote that she hoped the truth behind the Lin Family Murders could be clarified, describing the crime as “brutal, cruel, horrifying and outrageous”. Born in 1974, she said she had only recently realised that the tragedy occurred during the same era in which she herself grew up. She found it hard to imagine that such darkness had been hidden within a time she had once believed to be governed by stability and the rule of law. Janet Chia urged those in power at the time to confront the past with courage and hoped the incumbent government would explain the truth to society.
She later visited Gikong Presbyterian Church (義光教會), the site where the murders took place. Reflecting on the visit, she admitted: “It is rather embarrassing to say, although I had heard about the Lin family murders many times, each time I let it slip past the edge of my attention. Perhaps subconsciously I did not want to face it—did not want the worldview I had grown up with to be shaken.” She was struck to realise that the neighbourhood where she grew up lay only three kilometres from the crime scene, and that after living in Da’an District for more than twenty years—running daily through Daan Forest Park (大安森林公園)—she had never truly grasped that this history had unfolded so close by. She said it felt as if she had long been living in “another parallel world”, and now simply wished to make up for what she called “the real history of Taiwan”. “Looking at the cross,” she wrote, “I suddenly understood that love is not about denying pain, but remembering it, carrying it, and continuing forward.” She also shared an interview with Tien Chiu‑chin (田秋堇) — then the first witness to the murders and now a member of the Control Yuan (監察院) —to help others understand the background and testimony surrounding the case.
During the Lunar New Year holiday she also visited the Flowers of Freedom (自由花蕊) exhibition at Chiang Kai‑shek Memorial Hall. She described it as one of the best exhibitions she had ever seen and said it was worth visiting not only for every Taiwanese person but also for foreigners travelling to Taiwan. She recalled that as she and her husband stepped into Liberty Square (自由廣場) they naturally began singing the “Chiang Kai‑shek Memorial Song”, and even remembered the entire lyrics. As a child, she said, she had once sung the song with passionate admiration for a “great leader”; only later did she realise that for many others it carried memories of pain and resentment.
After viewing the exhibition she walked into the permanent Chiang Kai-shek exhibition. When visitors asked to take photographs with her, she suggested moving to the Flowers of Freedom exhibition area instead and jokingly “pushed” them to see it first. Her husband teased: “If you’d been born a little earlier, you’d probably have been arrested and shot.” She replied: “I’m probably the sort of person who would still step forward even knowing that might happen.” In her view, justice does not appear only when it is safe; it exists because someone is willing to stand up when it is not. The fact that people can now sing the “Chiang Kai‑shek Memorial Song” in the same square and freely enter an exhibition discussing authoritarian violence is itself a sign of historical transformation. “Only by understanding the past and embracing Taiwan’s identity,” she believes, “can society become more united.”
She urged Taiwanese society to reflect further: Why is World War II written into textbooks, depicted in films and commemorated in museums? If Germans had simply said, “It happened decades ago—let us stop talking about concentration camps,” how would the world today understand how a totalitarian system can turn a nation into a killing machine? For her, the purpose of history is never revenge, but a reminder of the depths of cruelty humanity is capable of. Only when the next generation understands the consequences of unchecked power—and how easily human life becomes cheap without judicial protection—can a democratic society truly mature. Guided by this conviction, she has also encouraged the public to visit the National Human Rights Museum to learn Taiwan’s history first-hand.
Responding to critics who accuse her remarks of “dividing society”, Janet Chia replied: “I thought about it carefully. What I am tearing apart is not ethnic groups, but the fragile pride that refuses to face history—because I used to be like that myself.”
(Featured photo by William Chen on Pexels)
