The bare historical facts are straight-forward enough. Taiwan reverted to Chinese rule in August 1945, on the day that the Japanese formally surrendered. Mainlanders began arriving on the island soon afterwards and were generally amazed to find it stable and prosperous (cf. Hou Xiaoxian's own family history, as explored in The Time to Live and the Time to Die). Chiang Kai-Shek, preoccupied with his anti- Communist civil war, first sent the brutal General Chen Yi to govern the island province. After the February 28 Incident massacre and the imposition of martial law, Chen Yi was replaced by the outwardly benign Wei Daoming, former Chinese ambassador to Washington, whose brief was to play down the role of the army in subjugating the island. In 1948, Wei was in turn replaced by General Chen Cheng, a much more sophisticated military man than Chen Yi, who instituted land reform and set about consolidating KMT rule to pave the way for Chiang Kai-Sheck's retreat to the island in 1949.
Hou Xiaoxian: Taiwan stopped being a Japanese colony in 1945, but Japanese influence remained very strong for at least twenty years after that. For one think, nearly everybody could speak Japanese: during the colonial period, it was mandatory at school and anyone who wanted to get ahead had to speak fluent Japanese. (Incidentally, that's why the characters Hinoe and Hinomi in the film read their names in Japanese; it was common at the time, and it doesn't imply anything about their political loyalties.) Also, people followed the Japanese example in dressing like Westerners; women wore flowers and skirts. Only the oldest people wore traditional Chinese clothes. People still used Japanese names for places like post offices and police stations. The graduation song used in schools was still the old Japanese song, with new Chinese lyrics.
The first wave of Mainlanders who arrived in 145 were not core KMT people. Most of them were outsiders jockeying for the kind of advantages they hadn't achieved in the Mainland. They came to Taiwan from many years of war, and they expected to operate in the same way they were used to. They used violence and they extorted money in any way they could. They didn't understand the social system built and left in place by the Japanese. The criminals, mostly from Shanghai, formed into gangs and behaved outrageously. The local criminals were shocked, but they had no choice but to follow suit and do 'business' the same way. They would have been wiped out if they hadn't; it was a matter of survival. That's what the gangster scenes in the film are all about. The conflicts between Mainland and Taiwanese gangs began in small towns and gradually spread to the cities. Nowadays, they're all mixed together and it's impossible to say who's who.
Many native Taiwanese were nostalgic for the Japanese period. Things were well run, there was social order. Thieves and burglars were unknown. When Chen Yi was put it charge, everything changed from the top down. He installed his own relatives in key government posts and virtually encouraged the same kind of nepotism at lower levels, too. He blockaded the economy, prohibiting trade with the Mainland, and then commandeered all the island's rice and himself and exported it to the Mainland. Local people loathed his rule and were staggered by the corruption.
Those feelings of shock and resentment were what fueled the February 28 Incident. It began on the evening of February 27 in Taipei. A woman selling Western cigarettes on the street was arrested by a policeman. (cigarettes were supposed to be a government monopoly, and so there was a lot of smuggling.) The woman was selling illegal cigarettes too, and so she begged for mercy. But the policeman beat her with his gun, and she fell and hit her head. Onlookers were enraged. Someone fired a shot, and someone died. The next day, the whole city was in an uproar. There was a huge protest demonstration outside the presidential palace, and the police opened fire on the demonstrator. After that, the whole island erupted into pitched battles between Taiwanese and Mainlanders.
Until that moment, Taiwan had a thriving free press. The corruption in Chen Yi's government was openly attacked. Chen Yi took the incident as an excuse to silence the press and to persecute intellectuals. There were thousands of arrests and disappearances'---in fact, it was uncannily like the crackdown in Beijing last year. Chen Yi tried to calm the situation by forming consultative committees to discuss and resolve Taiwan's problems. But he was actually biding his time until his reinforcement troops arrived; and when they did, the committees were their first victims. Most Taiwanese had little or no grasp of politics. The Japanese had encouraged the study of medicine, business, and so on, but not politics. In consequence, most people didn't understand the issues in the Mainland civil war. In the film, Wenliang is a typical character of the period. His trouble springs from the fact that he has no political sense; he literally doesn't know what he's doing. If he'd had anything behind him, in the way that his elder brother has his feudal traditions, he'd be a different person. Chen Cheng was sent to take over the island only when Chiang Kai-shek realized that he was losing the civil war. He immediately started implementing progressive policies like profit-sharing and land reform, which showed that he'd learned from his mistakes in the civil war. Taiwanese peasants till think of Chen Cheng quite fondly. I tried to acknowledge that by noting his death in The Time to Live and the Time to Die.
Of course, the Taiwanese Independence Movement was already underground by the time that Chen Cheng arrived. It still had support from a handful of Mainland intellectuals, but it was basically a native Taiwanese movement. When Chiang Kai-shek moved the seat of government to Taipei, some people in the movement thought that the Communists would follow to liberate Taiwan. Indeed, that could well have happened, if the Korean War hadn't got in the way. Anyhow, once Taiwan came under martial law, all opposition politics had to disappear from sight. Nothing could be discussed openly. I could have been arrested for even mentioning the February 28 Incident as recently as five years ago. That particular taboo was lifted only when Chiang Kai-shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1988.
Chinese tradition holds that you should keep your own affairs private. You're always supposed to show your best possible face, no matter what your real situation is. But I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I didn't make A City of Sadness because I purposely wanted to open up old wounds', as the Chinese put it, but because I know that we have to face ourselves and our history if we are ever to understand who we are and where we're going. I have no political motive for bringing the February 28 Incident to light. I just know that it's something we must face up to and resolve in our minds.
Postscript
Hou Xiaoxian: Given my age and background, I think I have some responsibility to the younger generation to go on exploring Taiwan's history. One of my projects deals with the criminal underworld during the Japanese occupation. I'm ready to leave modern subjects to limit myself to realism. For instance, I've been fascinated by the Tang Dynasty for the last two years, and I'd love to make a swordplay genre film set in that period. I want to shoot where I can deal with time and space in ways different from what I've done so far. I'd like to make something more expressionist. First, though I plan to make a TV film about Li Tianlu, the old man who has appeared in my last three films. He runs a traditional puppet theatre, and I want to record him and his work before it's too late.
(Interview recorded in Taipei [1989] and London [1990]. Thanks to Shu Kei, Chen Goufu and Zhang Tielin for translation.)