Moral Legacy of Negative Heritages: Taiwan’s Historical Sites of Injustice

• In Event: Gender and Transitional Justice and Democratization in Taiwan

Abstract

How does past state repression affect contemporary political attitudes? Existing research focuses on the effect of direct exposure to violence. In this paper, I argue that negative heritages, namely facilities established to detain, jail, and execute political dissents by the regime, can pose persistent impacts on surrounding citizens' political beliefs without actual violence through psychological deterrence and transmission of know-how on the violent nature of state. I test this hypothesis in the context of Taiwan. After being defeated in the Chinese Civil war in 1949, the Kuomintang (The Nationalist Party) regime fled to Taiwan and imposed a 38-year long martial rule. More than ten thousand victims were killed, imprisoned, and tortured in coercive facilities around the country during the period. Using information of 36 negative heritages identified by the Historical Sites of Injustice and individual-level survey data from the Asian Barometer Survey, I expect that people living nearby negative heritages like detention centers, prisons, and execution grounds, express lower trust in national institutions at the present day. My empirical strategy employs a quasi-experimental design by using modern-day jails as nearest counterfactuals to capture the average treatment effect of living near to historical negative heritages. Furthermore, I investigate heterogeneous effects of negative heritages with various functions, years of operations, scale of persecution, and status of preservation. This research contributes to the understanding of the moral legacy of authoritarian landscapes from an overlooked niche.

Author

• Chen-Yu Lee, University of Essex