Article #6 in A Seven-Article Series >>>>> An Overview of the History of Taiwan: The Case for Independence

The Guomindang Period of Control, 1945-2000

By the middle and latter years of the 1940s decade, the Taiwanese people held varying views on the Japanese exit from governmental authority.  Some had internalized a degree of loyalty to the Japanese that made the Japanese ouster a matter of regret.  Others held on to hopes for some form of autonomous Taiwanese governing entity.  Still others took a wait and see attitude as to what rulers of similar Chinese ethnicity might have in mind for the people of the island.  What soon became clear was that the demoralized and corrupt representatives of the Guomindang who arrived on Taiwan during the years 1945-1949 governed in an authoritarian mode reminiscent of the recently departed Japanese, but without the discipline, skill, and predictability that the Taiwanese people had come to expect during the Japanese period of control.

 

The arrogance and corruption that characterized the governmental authority represented by Chen Yi and his administration in the inauguration of the fifth occupation of Taiwan by an outside ruling power engendered a great deal of anti-Guomindang activity across the island that exploded with great furor in the February 28^th Incident (Er er ba shijian).  This uprising began with a seemingly unremarkable encounter between an old woman selling black market cigarettes and police who handled her roughly in the effort to get her to move on.  But this encounter drew angry crowds of people who pelted the police with rocks, sending others to get weapons that they brandished in a rush on police headquarters and on many streets of the city.  News of the incident spread throughout the island and spawned many weeks of protest, generally led by some of the brightest, best educated, most respected figures on Taiwan.  Before the government at last brought the larger movement inspired by the February 28^th Incident to a close, somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Taiwanese had lost their lives.[vii]

 

The Guomindang never entirely recovered from this false start, which lay etched in the memories of people of all walks of life for many decades leading up to the 1980s.  But the Guomindang did successfully cut a deal with the Taiwanese people that bought their cooperation with a governing regime that managed to right itself dramatically from its missteps in the events around the Chinese Civil War and the first years of its tenure of power on Taiwan.  Listening carefully to advisers from the United States that arrived in the wake of President Harry Truman’s order for United States ships to occupy the Taiwan Strait, and building on the infrastructure and certain policies set in motion during the Japanese era of control, the Guomindang authored a series of policy initiatives that transformed the economy of Taiwan.  A brilliant land reform program begun in stages during 1949-1953 laid the groundwork for a land to the tiller agrarian society that ended centuries of landlord domination of the countryside.  An import substitution policy dominated government economic activity during 1953-1961 and induced many private businesses to produce aggressively for the home market.  In 1962 came the shift to an  export orientation for Taiwan and its fellow “little dragons” (including also Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea) that effectively joined them to the “big dragon” of Japan in bringing economic clout to East Asia.

 

The Arab-Israeli conflict of 1973 brought the oil embargo disruptions of 1973-1974 that affected Taiwan along with all industrialized and industrializing economies of the world.  But decision-makers at the Guomindang’s Central Bank of China adjusted interest rates and monetary flow so as to ameliorate the inflationary impact on Taiwan’s populace, and Taiwan’s economy continued to grow rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s, weathering along the way a second oil crisis in 1979.[viii]  Just as the regime had greatly abetted its export-led strategy with the establishment of two Export Processing Zones (EPZs) in the Gaoxiong area and one near Taizhong in the late 1960s, so it adroitly propelled a shift to information and high technology goods with the establishment of the Xinzhu Science and Technology Center during the 1970s..[ix]  On the strength of apt economic moves that met the prevailing international and domestic conditions at given times, the Guomindang administration was able to keep the deal that it had cut with the Taiwanese people and hold opponents of the regime at bay well into the 1980s.

 

International political realignments in the meantime contributed to an increasingly unsettled political situation in Taiwan.  In 1971 the United Nations dropped its recognition of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China in favor of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) that was firmly ensconced as the actually governing force in China.  In 1972 the government of Japan gave formal diplomatic recognition to the PRC and the United States administration led by President Jimmy Carter did so in 1979.  By that time there was a well-developed movement of political opposition on Taiwan, formed of courageous activists who proved willing to challenge the one-party state.  A significant demonstration of discontent took place in the form of the 1979 Gaoxiong Incident, an event led by Shi Mingde and Lu Xiulian, that inspired anti-government forces throughout the island and gave impetus to the formation of a major political challenger to the Guomindang.  The ability of non-Guomindang candidates to compete effectively for public office had always been greatly circumscribed.  Those who did run against Guomindang candidates were labeled simply dangwai (“outside the party”).  By 1986 some people who had participated as dangwai candidates came together to form the Democratic Progressive Party (minjindang, the DPP), a party that included many of the participants in the Gaoxiong Incident and other key figures, most notably Chen Shuibian.

 

Against this backdrop of growing political opposition, President Chiang Ching-guo considered the future of the polity whose leadership his father Chiang Kai-shek had passed to him upon the latter’s death in 1975.  A person who had come to power as a hard-nosed operative with close ties to the military and security establishments, Chiang Ching-guo nevertheless proved capable of evolving an agreeable public persona with the vision to see that a new day was dawning across Taiwan’s political landscape.  In 1987 he lifted martial law, recognized the legitimacy of the DPP, and let it be know that his vice-president, a native Taiwanese by the name of Lee Teng-hui, had his blessing to lead the Guomindang party and government when Chiang’s Chingguo’s  failing health should render him incapable.  Lee did in fact assume power in 1988 upon Chiang Chingguo’s death.

 

Lee Teng-hui proved himself to be one of the master political operators of the late 20^th century.  He seized upon the opportunity offered him by public demonstrations at Taibei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in March 1990 to move toward major reforms in the two national legislative bodies, making the Legislative Yuan a truly representative body for which candidates could now campaign freely, and setting the National Assembly on a course toward extinction.  This latter body, comprised through most of the years of the “Republic of China” on Taiwan of largely mainlander figures who elected the president, gave way to Taiwan’s first democratic election of the president in 1996.  Lee Teng-hui won this election.  Riding high in popularity and in the course of his 1990s tenure of power having presided over a political miracle every bit as impressive as Taiwan’s  famous economic miracle, Li nevertheless declined to run again for president in 2000.  That election pitted Guomindang candidate Lien Chan against independent candidate James Soong and the Democratic Progressive Party’s Chen Shuibian.[x]  Chen won that election with a plurality of the votes, thus bringing to an end the Guomindang era of rule.  Chen won reelection in 2004 before becoming embroiled in a corruption scandal that eventually sent him to prison, a situation that provided an opportunity in a now democratic context for the Guomindang to win control of the presidency again via the candidacy of Ma Ying-jeou.

Taiwan is an independent political entity and will be an avowedly independent nation if the Taiwanese people, now free participants in a democratic polity, should decide to make such a formal declaration.  Since the leadership of the People’s Republic of China needs the Taiwan issue as part of its strategy to maintain control on the basis of nationalistic claims (along with economic prowess), a declaration of a new nation to be called, for instance, the Republic of Taiwan, would be pugnacious.  Such a declaration would have the potential of provoking a military confrontation that thus far few Taiwanese have shown a willingness to engender.