This article looks at the public process of dealing with the Cultural Revolution. This process began in 1976, and although many people inside and outside of China claim that there has been no public discussion of this event in the PRC, a closer look at events since 1976 reveals the contrary. The Cultural Revolution is indeed a major topic of public debate, even though the Chinese Communist Party would prefer for it to fall into oblivion.

     This article analyses several major contributions to the public debate about the Cultural Revolution. It starts with a discussion of the attempt of the CCP leadership to frame the memory of the Cultural Revolution by launching the campaign to criticize the “Gang of Four” and by passing the “Resolution on Some Questions Concerning the History of the Party since the Founding of the PRC” in 1981. It argues that the CCP changed its strategies several times, but has been consistently unable to monopolize public memory of the Cultural Revolution. Although the majority of publications from the PRC strongly criticize the Cultural Revolution as “ten years of chaos,” there seems to be a growing minority holding a more positive view of the period from 1966 to 1976. These views are mostly aired by overseas Chinese and are made known to the public in China through the internet. Despite the control of the internet by PRC authorities, these views have permeated into the public discussion in the PRC and have influenced official as well as unofficial historiography of the Cultural Revolution.

     This article discusses the public debate on the Cultural Revolution in the PRC in terms of a trauma process in which victims and victimizers aim at redefining an identity for the traumatized collective that would be instrumental in repairing the social fabric violated by mass violence during the early phase of the Cultural Revolution. It shows that the CCP leadership felt compelled to define a memory frame of overall complicity out of fear of continuous factional conflicts. However, instead of bringing about reconciliation, this strategy has impeded the process of working through trauma. That is why the debate on the Cultural Revolution is at the same time everywhere and nowhere. People shy away from settling their personal accounts and therefore keep silent on this issue; at the same time, a public discussion goes on but still has not reached the point where it can help to overcome factionalism and propose an assessment of the Cultural Revolution that can claim consensus. The Party is too weak either to create amnesia or to impose its memory frame on the people. The participants can drive the discussion on the Cultural Revolution onwards, but their memories are so fragmented that so far they can only contest the officially held view without replacing it by some other frame. The process of working through the trauma of the Cultural Revolution has not yet come to end.

　　In February 2007, professor Huang Chang-chian, an academician of the Academia Sinica published A Draft of Evidential Investigations into the Truth of the 2.28 Incident, a revisionist study designed to overthrow standard works describing previous research on the 2.28 Incident.

 　The first issue in this critique of Huang’s study considers the Kaohsiung Garrison Commander-in-Chief Peng Meng-chi, called a “butcher” for his indiscriminating killing of innocents. Huang concludes that Commander Peng did nothing wrong in ordering the army to attack those killed on the grounds that the “rioters had opened fire first, which thus called for the national army to counterattack.” Huang also holds the view that the telegram stating that “when a fighting general out in the field is faced with an emergency, he may disregard even the supreme order of the emperor” was simply a fabrication by Commander Peng. This critique argues that, on the contrary, Huang not only misread the archive, but also misused oral materials, while implicitly claiming the ability to discern the Commander-in-chief’s “good motives”—all in total disregard of numerous accounts of robberies and random killings. Moreover, this critique sees no motive for Peng Meng-chi, who edited and published his “Memoirs of the 2.28 Incident in Taiwan” in 1953, to quote a fabricated telegram; the fact that it was not incorporated in The 228 Incident: A Documentary Collection published by the Institute of Modern History of the Academia Sinica does not necessarily mean it did not exist.

     The second issue this critique considers is the “Eight New Sources” provided by Peng Meng-chi’s son Peng Yin-gang to Huang and Chu Hong-yuan. It is admitted these documents have clarified the facts about: (1) the “two” climbings of the mountains by militia representatives on the 5th and 6th of March, and (2) whether Lin Chieh did the same thing, but it has to be pointed out that merely on the basis of (1) the “representation” provided by the chairman of the Kaohsiung city council Peng Ching-kao to Commander-in-Chief Peng during the aftermath of the event, i.e. the 6th of March, and (2) the cable presented by Kaohsiung Mayor Huang Chung-tu and the council chairman Peng to Chen Yi, on the 8th of March, Huang Chang-chian has rashly asserted that they (the mayor and the council chairman) were abducted by force to the mountains by the “outlaw” Tu Kuang-min, which was thus used as the evidence to court-martial Tu. This critique, however, raises the question whether the testimony of Huang and Peng was made under their own free will. Moreover, Huang Chang-chian failed to substantiate his praise of Chiang Wei-chuan and his criticisms of Wang Tian-deng. Huang believed the discrepancy in the information on the Settlement Committee as reported by the newspapers resulted from Wang Tian-deng’s deliberate deception, but this is really a case of just finding a pretext to condemn someone you have already convicted. It can be held that Huang Chang-chian’s “attempt to verify falsehood for the sake of falsehood” not only confuses scholarly issues, but may also have a negative effect on justice and peaceful settlement in Taiwanese society.