A new national heritage site

The Council for Cultural Affairs (CCA) has won a major battle in President Chen Shui-bian's war on Chiang Kai-shek. The war started more than eight months ago when Chen declared a change of name for the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in the heart of Taipei City. The new name is the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Park. The Council for Economic Planning and Development decided to remove the wall surrounding the park, while the Ministry of Education began to remodel the hall, which is sandwiched by the National Concert Hall and the National Theater.

The government of the special municipality of Taipei, headed by Kuomintang (KMT) mayor Hau Lung-bin, joined the first battle by designating the whole compound as a cultural heritage site, outlawing any change and preserving it in its totality. The walls cannot be torn down. Nor can any remodeling be done to posthumously dethrone Chiang Kai-shek, who ruled Taiwan as president until his death in 1975.

Hau won the battle, but the Chen government wasn't defeated. The education ministry came up with the clever gimmick of downgrading the management of the memorial hall to make it unnecessary for the government to have an act amended by the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan to get rid of Chiang Kai-shek once and for all. That act was adopted shortly after Chiang's demise to establish a hall in his memory. Under the act, the management is an agency directly under control of the education minister, and any change that agency wants to make has to be approved by the legislature. A downgraded agency needs no consent of the lawmaking body, however. The sole purpose of the downgrading is to remove the giant statue of Chiang Kai-shek from the hall and the plaque bearing his name on the front gate of the now renamed memorial park.

A lull in the war followed. Then came the CCA's turn to pitch a battle. When Hau declared the hall a heritage site under control of his municipal government, the CCA panned him for a partisan attempt to save the repute of the "chief culprit" of the Feb. 28 Incident of 1947 by making a 30-year-old imperial palace-like building a historical relic. Incidentally, it's President Chen who called Chiang the chief culprit of the incident, in which thousands of innocent people were massacred. Reversing its stand, the CCA has proclaimed the hall a new national heritage site. That means the CCA, not the municipal authorities, is now in full charge of managing the memorial hall. It has the power to decide whether to remove the statue as well as the plaque, though it has gone on record saying it has no plan to do so at the present.

But the CCA is certainly going to change its mind in no time. The hall has to be rid of the plaque and the statue before Chen steps down as president on May 20 next year, and the opposition KMT can do next to nothing to stop it. Of course, its presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou, if elected, can reinstate Chiang Kai-shek in the hall, but that will be unnecessary. What's best for Taiwan is for President Chen to call it quits in the war on Chiang Kai-shek. If he persists, history will record the war as one a demagogue waged in an all-out attempt to obliterate from the collective memory of the people of Taiwan the contributions the late president made to their survival and economic prosperity.