Yu-Jhou (Jonathan) Chen

  

Volume 10 | Issue II | June 2026

Kaohsiung American School ’27

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

  

Studying Taiwan’s history has fascinated me less for the facts it teaches than for the questions it forces open. When I was younger, I accepted the fact that Taiwan’s transition from authoritarian rule was one of Asia's great democratic success stories. As I grew older, I started realizing what the story left out, and it began to bother me. Memorials existed, apologies were issued, but the people who tortured and enforced authoritarianism never stood trial. The question driving this paper grew out of that gap: what kind of democracy emerges when a country never holds its own perpetrators accountable? The project took close to a year. I worked through scholarship on the 228 Incident and the White Terror, presidential archives, and primary materials from the dangwai opposition press. The hardest part was learning to write about my own country from a critical distance, as I needed to treat Taiwan’s democracy not as a finished accomplishment. History, to me, is important as it contextualizes the present we live in and allows us to critically analyze our present. I am honored to publish this work in The Schola. I am also a runner and triathlete, and I play soccer and basketball whenever I can. I plan to continue studying human rights and political identity, and to keep writing about the country I grew up in.