Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei City

The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei City, Taiwan opened to the public in 1980, five years after Taiwan’s first president Chiang Kai-shek’s death, in honour of Chiang’s legacies after he established rule over Taiwan from 1949 onwards. Since Taiwan’s democratization in the late 1980s, the Memorial Hall and many of Chiang Kai-shek’s statues have become sites of heated contestation. In 2007, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was renamed Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall by the Democratic Progressive Party government. This renaming was reversed in 2009 by the nationalist Kuomintang government. In 2017, the Transitional Justice Act was passed in Taiwan which stipulates removal, renaming, or repurposing of authoritarian symbols. Ever since then, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, along with other Chiang statues in the public space, have been undergoing a new process of transformation.