I worked with a guy from Taiwan who was a scion of a high-level family in the Chinese Nationalist government. He thought extremely highly of himself and expected others to recognize his superiority.
I’ve run into scions of powerful families from several countries, including our own, who were arrogant jerks like that. It would seem Mr. Chou’s family was not high and mighty enough to be insulated from the islanders’ resentment back in the 1950s or so when he was a child if his memories were that bad, but we don’t really know that. Most of the mainlanders were ordinary people, civilian and soldier.
Some of the soldiers may well have been brutalized during the long years of fighting first the Japanese, then the civil war against the communists and the islanders suffered from that in the beginning. It rather sounds that way judging from what transpired in 1947.
Taiwan had been under Japanese colonial rule since 1895 until the Allies handed it over to the ROC after WWII. (Japanese rule started out decidedly on the brutal side, too, but had much improved by the 1930s.) One can see why the islanders were hostile towards the mainlanders (and the Allies, who had been bombing them), and perhaps why the mainlanders were not pleased the islanders (who had fought in the Japanese Army against them and who seemed to have preferred Japanese rule to the ROC). The Chinese curse of “interesting times” indeed.