Houston Community News >> Protests on Renaming of Taiwan Monument

5/19/2007 (AP) --Taiwan's president renamed a landmark Taipei memorial honoring the late dictator Chiang Kai-shek on Saturday, less than an hour after pro-and anti-government demonstrators fought running battles in an adjacent boulevard.

Chen Shui-bian's decision to change the name of the memorial to commemorate democracy activists came amid a continuing government campaign to belittle Chiang's memory in the run-up to Taiwan's 2008 presidential elections.

Earlier, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin of the main opposition Nationalists said Chen lacked authority to change the name of the Chiang memorial to the National Democracy Memorial Hall and vowed to try to stop him.

Just before Chen appeared at the site, upward of 500 people milled about in a broad boulevard near the park, with a few dozen involved in scuffling, eyewitnesses said. Several sustained minor injuries.

Surrounded by political allies and a heavy police presence, Chen said the removal of Chiang's name from the memorial marked a symbolic break with the past.

"The renaming of this memorial is a fundamental change in the nature of the park and of peoples' thinking," he said.

Minutes after he spoke, survivors of a 1947 attack in which thousands were reportedly killed by Nationalist forces in Taipei - violence that a government commission later said was ordered by Chiang - gathered around the memorial. They were cheered by Chen supporters and jeered by his detractors.

For months Chen and his ruling Democratic Progressive (nyse: PGR - news - people ) Party have chipped away at Chiang's memory, removing his name from Taiwan's main international airport and ordering hundreds of Chiang statues to be dismantled from military bases around the island.

But removing Chiang's name from the memorial in the center of Taipei was the most significant move yet, challenging Chiang's Nationalist successors to respond forcefully in the run-up to next year's presidential elections.

The white, palace-like memorial hall with its gleaming, blue-tiled octagonal roof stands out as one of the few examples of classic Chinese architecture in Taiwan's gritty capital. It houses a huge statue of Chiang and memorabilia from his years in power.

The Ministry of Education said in a statement that the memorabilia would be preserved at its present site "with the aim of enabling exhibition goers to fully appreciate the ordeal of Taiwan's democratization." It was unclear whether the statue would be dismantled.

Chiang led the Nationalists for more than two decades on the Chinese mainland, and continued his stewardship on Taiwan for another 26 years, following his defeat at the hands of Mao Zedong's Communists in 1949.

After his death in 1975, opponents of his iron-fisted regime coalesced around a reformist group that eventually became the Democratic Progressive Party.

That party - and some younger Nationalists - revile Chiang as an uncompromising dictator responsible for killing and imprisoning thousands of political opponents.

Hardcore Nationalist supporters praise him as the architect of Taiwan's rapid economic development and the island's strong defense establishment.

(Contributed by AP)