Chapter 1 – Introduction
1.1 Research Background
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Chapter 1 – Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Recent developments in the political landscape of Taiwan and South Korea have led to a renewed interest in the concept of justice, specifically for historical abuses of human rights perpetrated by these countries’ previous authoritarian regimes. In Taiwan,
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen was elected in January 2016 and pledged to carry out broad reforms in the justice system, as well as push for renewed transitional justice measures for violations that occurred during the 228 Incident1 and the succeeding four decade period of martial law imposed by the KMT.
Since then, the Tsai administration and DPP-controlled Legislative Yuan have been working to carry out some tangible transitional justice measures. The Act Governing the Handling of Ill-Gotten Party Properties by Political Parties and their Affiliate
Organizations was passed in July 2016, and the next month the Ill-Gotten Party Assets Settlement Committee (Budang dangchan chuli weiyuanhui, 不當黨產處理委員會) was inaugurated (EY Press Release, 2016). Currently, the DPP caucus in the legislature is attempting to draft a transitional justice promotion act, which would “focus on judicial redress, legal remedy and collection of political archives,” as well as “deal with the misappropriation or illegal occupation of government properties” (Chiu, April 2017).
These are important developments for Taiwan, where, in a poll taken by the Taiwanese magazine Business Today (今周刊) in March 2016, 76.3% of respondents believe that transitional justice is still incomplete (Taiwan chengwei zhenzheng minzhu guojia, 2016).
Meanwhile, in South Korea, two consecutive conservative presidencies seemed to have proved regressive in relation to the large strides that had been made in democracy, respect for human rights, and transitional justice throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s there. This includes an unpopular deal between the Park Geun-hye government and
1 Also known as the February 28 Incident or the 228 Massacre, although the latter carries a much more politically charged connotation. For the purposes of maintaining academic neutrality, this thesis will use
“228 Incident,” with the exception of quotes or titles in which another term is used.
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that of Japan to compensate Korean “comfort women,”2 in return for the removal of a bronze “comfort woman” statue erected by protesters outside the Japanese consulates in Seoul and Busan. Park, daughter of deceased former military dictator Park Chung-hee, was elected in 2011 in part due to nostalgia amongst older conservative Koreans for the economic prosperity and heightened security experienced under her father’s despotic rule. This was an interesting choice of president for what is considered to be a consolidated democracy.
However, in late 2016, it was revealed that President Park had been entrusting an
extremely large amount of decision-making power to a childhood friend, the daughter of a cult leader named Choi Soon-sil, and had also helped Choi extort bribes from a number of the large Korean conglomerates, called chaebol. In response to these revelations, massive demonstrations took place in city centers throughout South Korea, comprised mainly of younger Koreans, and reminiscent of the democracy movement protests that had erupted across the country thirty years before. In March 2017, Park was impeached, removed from office, and is currently facing a prison sentence. Moon Jae-in, once a human rights lawyer and aide to Roh Moo-hyun, the late former president who pushed forward the vast majority of transitional justice legislation in South Korea, won the vacant presidential seat in May 8, 2017. His victory will likely entail a change in both international and domestic policy, and there is hope that this change will include a renewed focus on addressing South Korea’s troubled authoritarian past.
Transitional justice can generally be understood as “the conception of justice associated with periods of political change, characterized by legal responses to confront the
wrongdoings of repressive predecessor regimes” (Teitel, 2003, p. 69). Change here means the transition of a country’s governing system from non-democracy to democracy, as in the case of South Africa or Chile; it might also include a post-conflict scenario, such as Rwanda. This notion of justice is based on the “increased expectation that
2 “Comfort women” is the euphemism given to females forced, coerced, or tricked into sex slavery for the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. They were taken from Japan’s former colonial and territorial holdings, and included women from Taiwan, Korea, Manchuria, Indonesia, and the Philippines, among others. The system of “comfort stations” was expanded to fight the negative image the Japanese military gave itself with incidents such as the Nanjing Massacre, in which indiscriminate rape of young women and girls took place.
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accountability is due after atrocity” (Hayner, 2011, p. 8). Atrocity in this sense can take any of a number of forms, including genocide, civil warfare, imprisonment for political offences, disappearing of dissidents, and arbitrary execution, among others.
The modern conception of transitional justice is said to have originated in the period following World War I, gaining more traction after 1945, with the Nazi war crimes trials and reparations paid to German Jewish victims of Nazi atrocities. The democratization of many Latin American, African, Asian, and post-communist governments in the period leading up to and following the end of the Cold War represented a new direction for the pursuit of justice in the aftermath of various civil wars and democratic transformations, moving away from the international criminal trials of postwar Europe to a more
restorative form of justice seeking. This change “included questions about how to heal an entire society and incorporate diverse rule of law values, such as peace and
reconciliation” (Teitel, 2003, p. 77).
The pursuit of transitional justice varies from country to country, but invariably involves one or more of “three main mechanisms (i.e. human rights trials, truth commissions and amnesties), along with lustration, reparations, institutional reform, and commemorative acts, monuments, and museums” (Dancy, et al., 2013, p. 1). The mechanisms will be discussed in further detail in the second section of the literature review.
Lastly, in order to understand the foundation for arguments in favor of accountability for past abuses of power and human rights in Taiwan and South Korea, it is necessary to provide some discussion of each country’s democratization process. This is because transitional justice is a concept almost inextricably linked with democratic transitions or post-conflict situations. It is inherently difficult to apportion some form of accountability in a country still under authoritarian rule because wrongdoers are still in positions of significant power. However, democratization is not a black-and-white condition, as extenuating circumstances can lead to a democratized country instituting either stronger or weaker methods of transitional justice, or not pursuing the matter at all. A brief
examination of democratization in Taiwan and South Korea presents a better idea of how such a process can differ from one case to another.
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Before delving into the specifics of the democratic transitions that took place in Taiwan and South Korea, it is important to understand the broad similarities in each country’s 20th century histories. Both carry the legacy of colonization by the Japanese; both
remained under authoritarian rule for a similar amount of time, and began democratizing in the 1980s (Jacobs, 2007); both experienced rapid economic growth before becoming democracies by utilizing similar, yet unique, developmental state models; both underwent a smooth and relatively peaceful transition from autocratic rule to democracy
(Huntington, 1992); and both, despite having faced numerous challenges to democratic consolidation and institutionalization over the years since transition, have prevailed as open and liberal democracies.
In South Korea, a process of what Huntington terms “transplacement,” in which moderate elements in both the ruling military dictatorship and the opposition negotiated the terms of the transition, was responsible for the large-scale democratic reforms of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Huntington, 1993, Ch. 3). The nature of this transition and the “different power structures” that exist “in the post-transition politics” have greatly influenced how democratic South Korea has dealt with its authoritarian predecessor regime (Wu, 2005, p.
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Kim (1997) argues that “the main impetus” for democratization in Korea “came from the authoritarian regime’s overconfidence about its legitimacy and stability” (p.1135) in its move to liberalize in the early 1980s and then to hold direct elections in 1987 (Robinson, 2007, p. 167). These measures were also taken in response to the growth of strong civil society elements, including people’s movement groups, “such as the Korea Teachers’
Union, the Korea Trade Union Confederation, and student organizations” (Kim, 1997, p.
p. 1137). In fact, it was the student protests organized by the National Coalition of University Student Representatives that “sparked off a series of political demonstrations”
and culminated in Roh Tae-woo’s Eight Point Declaration, a concession which catalyzed the process of democratization in 1987 (Lee, 2002, p. 832).
Taiwan, meanwhile, experienced a transition to democracy without a change of regime, although reforming the one-party system was a gradual process of liberalization and
“Taiwanization (本土化)” of the ruling party, the KMT (Tien, pp. 40-43; Jacobs, 2005).
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This has had a determining effect on its achieving transitional justice, as power structures have remained fundamentally the same post-transition.
The main thrust of democratization in Taiwan was a process of what Huntington calls
“transformation,” in that moderate elites in the KMT regime led the charge in facilitating the transition (Huntington, 1993, Ch. 3; Jacobs, 2012, pp. 12-14). The decision not to arrest members of the newly established DPP in 1986 and the lifting of martial law in 19873 showed the influence of these more liberal elements in the KMT may have had on then-dictator Chiang Ching-kuo. In the years since democratization, this argument has been challenged. Many who took an active part in pushing for democracy and rule of law in Taiwan believe that their efforts, like those of democracy activists and civil society organizations in South Korea, were just as responsible for Taiwan’s transition.
Some have pointed to local elections which took place in Taiwan from the 1950s onward as possibly having laid the groundwork for democratization (Jacobs, 2007, p. 236; Chao
& Meyers, 2000). Others have noted the development of a free press, which began with the creation of the Free China Fortnightly in the 1950s and the Formosa Magazine Group in the 1970s was a significant contributing factor (Cheng, 1989; Tien, 1992, pp.
41-42). Lee (2002) points to large-scale protest movements, such as the Tangwai4 and Wild Lily student demonstrations5, as playing a central role in the transformation process, something which it had in common with South Korea (p. 833). Most agree, however, that it was a confluence of different factors that set the stage for a gradual, yet peaceful transition to democracy in Taiwan.
3 Under the martial law rule of the KMT, political parties that were not approved of by the ruling party were considered illegal. Political organizations that had formed in the past, such as Lei Chen’s China Democratic Party, were crushed and their leaders imprisoned. This made the peaceful development of the DPP’s formation all the more notable (Cheng, 1989; Jacobs, 2013)
4 Literally meaning “outside the party,” the tangwai is the term used for what began as a loosely organized group of middle-class Taiwanese who worked to campaign for empty parliamentary seats after the original mainlander legislators began to pass away. They eventually congealed into a bona fide group of opposition politicians in the 1980s and were the core of the Democratic Progressive Party, Taiwan’s first true
opposition party.
5 The largest student movement in Taiwan’s history, the Wild Lily protests began in March of 1990 to urge reform of the National Assembly, whose terms of membership were heavily skewed in favor of the ruling mainlander elite. The protests were nonviolent and extremely well-organized, included sit-ins and hunger strikes, and estimates of the number of demonstrators range from 4,000 to 30,000 (Katsiaficas, 2013; Roy, 2003).
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