Why Taiwan is pulling down statues of Chiang Kai-shek

While the West obsesses about whether or not China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, is going to invade Taiwan, the Taiwanese seemingly have other concerns. Today the hot issue is statues. To be precise, statues of Chiang Kai-shek, the post-war founder-dictator of independent modern Taiwan.

In an inventory taken in 2000 it was estimated that there were over 43,000 statues of Chiang in Taiwan. A removal process, albeit limited in scale, was begun shortly after. Some 150 statues were removed and taken to the sculpture garden that surrounds the mausoleums of Chiang and his son Chiang Ching-kuo – a place often referred to as the ‘Garden of the Generalissimos’. So why then is the newly elected Taiwanese Democratic Progressive party president, Lai Ching-te, planning to remove 760 more Chiang statues?

To explain why the statue issue is such a hot topic with not insignificant relevance to Taiwan’s current and future relationship with China, we need to delve back a little in history to the Chinese civil war that brought Mao Tse-Tung to power.