These guys are beyond pathetic.
Much of the 228 documentation comes from US military sources and George Kerr (the Taiwan expert for the US during WWII). As for food shortages, the big problem is that Chiang was shipping all the food in Taiwan to support his failing efforts in China. As my father-in-law noted, nobody starved during WWII (except the Japs, who wouldnt play the black market), but food became real scarce soon after the KMT moved in.
These guys are just apologists for the old regime.
You could be right about the motives of these historiand, but Academia Sinica doesn't usually hire or suffer political hacks.
"historians," not whatever that jumble was that I typed.
The problem in post WW2 Taiwan wasn't food shortages, but rather hyper-inflation and a major restructuring needed in the economy on Taiwan. Taiwan at the end of second world war was essentially an agricultural outpost of Imperial Japan and it's economic development for the last 50 years or so had been shaped by planners for that purpose. The problem was because since Taiwan was part of Japan's imperial economic structure, it was protected from the necessity of competition against the rest of the world due to a captive market back home in Japan. It was simply inefficient and after the end of the war, Taiwan lost its primary, almost only market and it's new principal market was both embroiled in a massive civil war and could not afford to takeover Japan's role in Taiwan's economy at the time. It's foolish to blame KMT mismanagement as the cause of the economic crisis on Taiwan in the late 40's because the truth of the matter is, it would have happened irregardless of the government because of the over-riding regional and global economic factors immediately following the war.
p.s. Nobody starved in Germany during the war either, but they did after it. This is because Germany was primarily engaging in systematic looting of occupied territories and manipulating of currencies favorable to the reichsmark to sustain the material prosperity of it's citizens during wartime at the expense of everyone else.