China's Martyrs or Taiwan's Political Victims? Geopolitical Memory Warfare and the Resilience of Transitional Justice

• In Event: Collective Memory & Heritage

Abstract

Current Memory Studies literature largely overlooks the PRC’s cross-border competition to reconstruct Taiwan’s authoritarian past. Taiwan endured authoritarian rule (1949–1992), accumulating over 20,000 political victims. Since the 1990s, Taiwan’s transitional justice (TJ) work has been institutionalized, solidifying the victim narrative as the social mainstream. Marginal counter-memories—casting political victims as either “heroic resisters” or “social order disruptors”—persist internally, but remain largely peripheral.

Since the 2010s, Beijing has initiated systematic geopolitical memory interventions targeting Taiwan. This operation includes the establishment of commemorative sites like Beijing’s Xishan Anonymous Heroes’ Square, and the production of media content (e.g., the 2025 peak phenomenon Silent Glory) to reframe those executed in the 1950s as “revolutionary martyrs.” This “martyrization” narrative uses moral vocabulary to homogenize Taiwanese resistance actors as figures serving the PRC’s unification and propaganda goals.

This paper uses Taiwan’s White Terror memory to propose a framework of “Institutionalized Memory Resilience.” Resilience is defined as the capacity for a collective memory framework to maintain its core function and adapt under external manipulation and internal contention, emerging from the dynamic interaction of institutions and social memory.

Author

• Hungling Yeh, National Taiwan University