Taipei, Taiwan – Even as Taiwan prepares for the inauguration of its eighth president next week, it continues to struggle over the legacy of the island’s first president, Chiang Kai-shek.

To some, Chiang was the “generalissimo” who liberated the Taiwanese from the Japanese colonisers. To many others, he was the oppressor-in-chief who declared martial law and ushered in the period of White Terror that would last until 1992.

For decades, these duelling narratives have divided Taiwan’s society and a recent push for transitional justice only seems to have deepened the fault lines. Now, the division is raising concern about whether it might affect Taiwan’s ability to mount a unified defence against China, which has become increasingly assertive in its claim over the self-ruled island.

“There is a concern when push comes to shove if the civilians work well with the military to defend Taiwan,” said historian Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang of the University of Missouri in the United States.

On February 28, 1947, Chiang’s newly-arrived Kuomintang (KMT) troops suppressed an uprising by Taiwan natives, killing as many as 28,000 people in what became known as the February 28 Incident. In the four-decade-long martial law era that followed, thousands more perished.

This traumatic history met its official reckoning in 2018, when the Taiwan government set up its Transitional Justice Commission modelled after truth and reconciliation initiatives in Africa, Latin America and North America to redress historical human rights abuses and other atrocities.

When the commission concluded in May 2022, however, advocates and observers said they had seen little truth and hardly any reconciliation.

Almost from the first days of the commission, the meting-out of transitional justice became politicised across the blue-versus-green demarcation that has long defined Taiwan’s sociopolitical landscape, with blue representing KMT supporters and green the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

A recently published anthology entitled Ethics of Historical Memory: From Transitional Justice to Overcoming the Past explains how the way Taiwanese remember the past shapes how they think about transitional justice. And as that recollection is determined by which camp they support, each champions their own version of Taiwan’s history.

“That’s why transitional justice seems so stagnant now,” explained Jimmy Chia-Shin Hsu, research professor at the legal research institute Academia Sinica who contributed to and edited the book. “Whatever truth it uncovers would be mired in the blue-green narrative.”

A non-partisan view, Hsu said, is to credit the DPP with codifying transitional justice and Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected KMT president, with breaking the taboo on broaching the February 28 Incident.

The past shaping the future

In February, Betty Wei attended the commemoration for the February 28 incident for the first time and listened intently to the oral history collected from the survivors. Wei, 30, said she wanted to learn more about what happened because her secondary school textbook had brushed over what many consider a watershed event in a few cryptic lines, and many of her contemporaries showed little interest.

“In recent years the voices pushing for transitional justice have grown muted,” Wei told Al Jazeera. “A lot of people in my generation think the scores are for previous generations to settle.”

In Taiwan, the past is never past, and rather it is fodder for new fights.

As the DPP gears up for an unprecedented third consecutive term, the unfinished business of removing the island’s remaining statues of Chiang has resurfaced as the latest front in what Yang, the historian, described to Al Jazeera as “this memory war”.

More than half of the initial 1,500 monuments have been taken down over the past two years, with the remaining statues mostly on military installations.

Yang argues that is because the top brass rose through the ranks under martial law and many still regard Chiang as their leader, warts and all. For them, toppling the statues would be an attack on their history.

The statues embody “the historical legacy the military wants to keep alive,” Yang said. “That’s a source of tension between the military and the DPP government.”

On the eve of William Lai Ching-te taking his oath as the island’s next president, Taiwanese will for the first time mark the “White Terror Memorial Day” on May 19, the day when martial law was declared in 1949.

While it is clear Taiwanese have promised to never forget, whom and how to forgive has become far murkier.

As the former chairman of the Taiwan Association for Truth and Reconciliation, the first NGO advocating for the cause, Cheng-Yi Huang lauded the government’s move to take over the KMT’s private archives in recent years but lamented there had been too little truth-seeking so far.

For example, under the February 28 Incident Disposition and Compensation Act, Huang said many have chosen to stay silent about their complicity because only victims get compensation.

However, Taiwan’s tumultuous history means the line between victim and victimiser is rarely clear-cut.

By digging into military archives, Yang has shed light on how Chinese were kidnapped and pressed into service by the KMT in the last years of the Chinese Civil War. Those who tried to flee were tortured and even murdered. And the native Taiwanese who rose up to resist KMT’s suppression were persecuted as communists.

“Under martial law, the military was seen as an arm of the dictatorship, but they were also victims of the dictator’s regime,” Yang told Al Jazeera. “The transitional justice movement has missed the opportunity to reconcile Taiwanese society with the military.”

To Hsu, Beijing’s belligerence demands Taiwanese of all stripes find a common cause.

“As we’re facing the threat from the Chinese Communist Party, it’s imperative that we unite in forging a collective future,” said Hsu, to a standing-room-only book talk during the Taipei International Book Exhibition in late February.

“And how we remember our past will shape this future of ours.”

NEW YORK (AP) — The Dow Jones Industrial Average just topped 40,000 for the first time, the latest pop in what’s been a surprisingly good year for Wall Street.

But just like New Year’s represents an arbitrary point in time in the Earth’s revolution around the sun, such milestones for the Dow don’t mean that much inherently.

For one, with just 30 companies, the Dow represents a tiny slice of Corporate America. For another, almost no one’s 401(k) account sees its performance depend on the Dow, which has become more of a relic used for historical comparisons.

Here’s a look at what the Dow is, how it got here and how its use among investors is on the wane:

WHAT IS THE DOW?

It’s a measure of 30 established, well-known companies. These stocks are sometimes known as “blue chips,” which are supposed to be on the steadier and safer side of Wall Street.

WHAT’S IN THE DOW?

Not just industrial companies like Caterpillar and Honeywell, despite the name.

The roster has changed many times since the Dow began in 1896 as the U.S. economy has transformed. Out, for example, was Standard Rope & Twine, and in recently have been big technology companies.

Apple, Intel and Microsoft are some of the newer-economy names currently in the Dow. The financial industry also has a healthy representation with American Express, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Travelers. So does health care with Amgen, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and UnitedHealth Group.

WHAT’S ALL THE HUBBUB NOW?

The Dow just crossed its latest 10,000 point threshold to top 40,000 briefly in midday trading on Thursday. It took about three and a half years to make the leap from 30,000 points, which it first crossed in November 2020.

It’s kept chugging mostly higher despite the worst inflation in decades, painfully high interest rates meant to get inflation under control and worries that high rates would make a recession inevitable for the U.S. economy.

Companies are now in the midst of reporting their best profit growth in nearly two years, and the economy has managed to avoid a recession, at least so far.

IS THE DOW THE MAIN MEASURE OF WALL STREET?

No. The Dow represents only a narrow slice of the economy. Professional investors tend to look at broader measures of the market, such as the S&P 500 index, which has nearly 17 times the number of companies within it.

More than $11.2 trillion in investments were benchmarked to the S&P 500 at the end of 2019, according to estimates from S&P Dow Jones Indices. That’s 350 times more than the $32 billion benchmarked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Investors’ 401(k) accounts are much more likely to include an S&P 500 index fund than anything tied to the Dow. The S&P 500 crossed above its own milestone Wednesday, topping 5,300 points for the first time.

That’s what more investors care about. Well, 100-point milestones matter for the S&P 500 as little as others, but the fact that the S&P 500 is higher than ever matters a lot.

HOW DIFFERENT ARE THE DOW AND THE S&P 500?

Their performances have historically tracked relatively closely with each other, but the S&P 500 has been better recently. Its 29.3% rise for the last 12 months easily tops the 21.1% gain for the Dow.

That’s in part because the S&P 500 has more of an emphasis on Big Tech stocks, which were responsible for most of the S&P 500’s gains last year. Hopes for an easing of interest rates by the Federal Reserve and a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology have pushed them to dizzying heights.

The Dow reflects none of the movements of such marquee stocks as Alphabet, Meta Platforms or Nvidia.

IS THAT IT?

No, the Dow and S&P 500 also take different approaches to measuring how an index should move.

The Dow gives more weight to stocks with higher price tags. That means stocks that add or subtract more dollars to their stock price push and pull it the most, such as UnitedHealth Group and its $523 stock price. A 1% move for that stock, which is about $5, packs a radically harder punch than a 1% move for Walmart, which is about 63 cents

The S&P 500, meanwhile, gives more weight to stocks depending on their overall size. That means a 1% move for Walmart carries more weight than a 1% move for UnitedHealth Group because Walmart is a slightly bigger company by total market value.

SO WHY CARE ABOUT THE DOW?

Because it’s so old, it has a longer track record than other measures of the market.

For a while, a triple-digit move for the Dow also offered an easy shorthand way to show the stock market was having a big day. Now, though, it means much less. A 100 point swing for the Dow means a move of less than 0.3%.

Russian tycoon Oleg Deripaska dismissed the latest U.S. sanctions on a series of companies that the U.S. Treasury said were connected to a scheme to evade sanctions and unlock frozen shares as nonsense.

“This balderdash isn’t worth the time,” Deripaska said by message via a spokesperson in response to a Reuters request for comment about the latest U.S. sanctions.

“While the horrific war in Europe claims hundreds of thousands of lives every year, politicians continue to engage in their dirty games. I strongly believe that we need to do everything we can to establish peace, not serve the interests of warmongers,” he said.

NEW US SANCTIONS AGAINST RUSSIA TARGET WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT, BAN URANIUM IMPORTS FOR NUCLEAR POWER

The U.S. Treasury on Tuesday announced it had sanctioned a web of Russian companies it said were being used to disguise ownership of a $1.6 billion industrial stake controlled by Deripaska.

Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International was planning to buy the stake and dropped the transaction following mounting U.S. pressure to abort the bid.

In its sanctions announcement, the U.S. Treasury alleged it was an “attempted sanctions evasion scheme” to unfreeze a stake using “an opaque and complex supposed divestment.”

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Deripaska has been sanctioned by Britain for his alleged ties to Putin. He has mounted a legal challenge against the sanctions which he says are based on false information and ride roughshod over the basic principles of law and justice.

Deripaska, who made his fortune by buying up stakes in aluminum factories, has also been subjected to sanctions by the United States, which in 2018 took measures against him and other influential Russians.

Those sanctions were “groundless, ridiculous and absurd”, Deripaska has previously said.