Article #4
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 28th 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 28th Incident to a close,
somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 Taiwanese had lost their lives.
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.[i] 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..[ii] 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 20th 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.[iii] 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
[ii] Lin
Songlin, in his Jiang jingguo di shidai
[the Chiang Ching-kuo era] (Taibei: Fenglin Shidai Ltd, 1993), pp. 23-31, gives
a detailed discussion of the Ten Major Projects that symbolized the dynamic
economic moves of the administration during the 1970s. See also Murray A. Rubenstein, “
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