Formosa Calling
An Eyewitness Account of the February 28th, 1947 Incident
Allan J. Shackleton
Camphor Press | New edition June 2022 (first published 1998) | 162 pages
$4.99 (e-book) | ISBN
978-1-910736-42-5
$14.99 (paperback) | ISBN
978-1-78869-277-9
$24.99 (hardback) | ISBN
978-1-78869-162-8
Description
Recently occupied by the Nationalist Chinese regime, Taiwan in early 1947 was a powder keg. Anger at the corrupt misrule of the new government erupted into protests and riots, which quickly became an island-wide uprising. The response from the Nationalists was brutal and overwhelming – a weeks-long massacre in which local leaders and intellectuals were systematically slaughtered. Estimates of the dead range from ten thousand to thirty thousand. The killings became known as the “228 Massacre”, the “228 Incident”, or simply “228”, after the date of the first riots (February 28).
Allan J. Shackleton was a New Zealand officer with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration assigned to in Taiwan at the time. His eyewitness account of the massacre is an important piece in understanding modern Taiwan’s founding tragedy. Shackleton tried for years to get Formosa Calling published, but it was deemed too politically sensitive during the Cold War, when “Free China” was an ally of the Western world. With the help of Chen Mei-chin and Gerrit van der Wees of Taiwan Communiqué and Stanley Liao of the New Zealand Taiwanese Association the book finally appeared in 1998, fifty years after it was written.
This new Camphor Press edition has minor corrections throughout and is now available in e-book format for the first time.
