Preface: Taiwan's Path to Democracy.

1) After the War

When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Nationalist government took over everything Japan left behind in China: administrative offices, factories, machinery, weapons, granaries, businesses, bank assets, and railway equipment. In principle these were state assets. In practice the takeover (jieshou, 接收) became large-scale plunder by Nationalist officials and officers, so widespread that people punned on the word and called it jieshou (劫收), "robbery-takeover." Officials were mocked for "passing the five exams" (五子登科), acquiring gold, houses, cars, cash, and women.

The damage was worst in the Northeast. Manchuria had the most complete industrial base in China, and Japan left behind arsenals, steelworks, railways, and machinery on an enormous scale. The Nationalists had no roots there, and discipline was even harder to enforce. Soviet troops, who occupied the region from August 1945 into 1946, had already dismantled much of the heavy industry and shipped it to the Soviet Union, the Anshan steelworks above all. After the Nationalists arrived, much of what remained was misappropriated or sold off, and production collapsed. Japanese stockpiles in Shenyang and Changchun, including grain, cloth, medicine, industrial parts, military supplies, and everyday goods, were carted away, often unrecorded. Residents who expected the stores to be distributed found the warehouses empty. Prices soared and the black market boomed. Takeover officials moved into the best Japanese housing. Rail equipment, coal-mine machinery at places like Fushun and Benxi, and other strategic assets were stripped and sold, while wages went unpaid and workers were laid off.

The political cost was enormous. City residents saw corruption and disorder. Workers who lost wages and jobs became recruits for Communist labor organizing. Intellectuals, dismayed by the government's incompetence, began to look for change. In the countryside, the Communists built peasant associations and redistributed land. The land reform was violent, but it mobilized millions of peasants who now had something to fight for. The Nationalists, by contrast, relied on landlords and the baojia system of collective household surveillance, and their base kept shrinking.

The military collapse came in three campaigns. In the Liaoshen Campaign (September–November 1948), the Communists took Jinzhou and cut the Nationalist armies in the Northeast off from the south. The Nationalists lost about 470,000 men and all of Manchuria. In the Huaihai Campaign (November 1948–January 1949), they committed roughly 800,000 troops and lost about 550,000, including their best American-equipped units, and with them East and Central China. In the Pingjin Campaign, the Nationalist commander in the north, Fu Zuoyi, negotiated the surrender of Beiping in January 1949, and the city changed hands without a fight. Washington, which had first hoped for a Nationalist-Communist coalition, grew disillusioned with the Nationalists' corruption and ineffectiveness, and watched them lose despite American aid. In August 1949 the State Department's "China White Paper" effectively wrote them off.

Taiwan, 1945–1947

Taiwan had its own version of the takeover. After fifty years of Japanese rule, many Taiwanese greeted the arrival of the "motherland government" in 1945 with real hope. Within months it was gone. The administration of Chen Yi, the Chief Executive of Taiwan Province, was corrupt and unprofessional, the black market flourished, prices exploded, troops were undisciplined, and daily life deteriorated fast.

On the evening of February 27, 1947, near the Tianma Teahouse in Taipei, agents of the state Monopoly Bureau caught a widow named Lin Jiang-mai selling untaxed cigarettes. They beat her with a pistol butt. When a crowd surrounded them, one agent fired and killed a bystander, Chen Wen-xi. The next day, February 28, protesters marched on the Chief Executive's Office, where soldiers opened fire on the crowd. Demonstrators took over the Taiwan Broadcasting Station and broadcast the news across the island. Within days protests had spread to cities in the north, center, and south. Students, lawyers, doctors, and merchants joined. Local elites formed Settlement Committees and put forward demands for reform: provincial self-government, an end to military interference in civil administration, Taiwanese participation in government, investigations of corruption, and freedom of speech.

Chen Yi stalled. He appeared to negotiate while secretly cabling Nanjing for troops, and intelligence units compiled lists of "rebels," treating the Taiwanese elite as insurgents. Nanjing decided in early March to put down the unrest by force. From March 8, reinforcements, including the 21st Division, landed at Keelung and Kaohsiung. Troops searched street by street, arresting, executing, and disappearing suspects. The victims were not only protesters but doctors, teachers, lawyers, students, businessmen, local notables, journalists, and community organizers: anyone who might lead organized resistance. The effect, and plausibly the aim, was to remove Taiwan's local elite as a source of challenge. There is no official death toll. The Executive Yuan's 1992 research report estimated 18,000 to 28,000 dead; other estimates are lower.

The 228 Incident opened a rift between Taiwanese and mainlanders that entered collective memory as fear and resentment. With the local elite gone, mainland officials held all real power for decades, organized opposition disappeared, and a culture of fear took hold. In many families one rule was passed down: don't talk about politics.

The Retreat to Taiwan

The Nationalists' move to Taiwan was not sudden. It accelerated gradually from 1948 to 1950. Taiwan had railways, power plants, and schools built under Japanese rule, a working agricultural and industrial base, and the Taiwan Strait as a moat. As the war turned in late 1948, the government began shipping the Central Bank's gold reserves to Taiwan, along with treasures from the Palace Museum collection and national archives, in several batches from Nanjing and Shanghai. Parts of Academia Sinica and other research institutions moved as well. The government itself retreated in stages, from Nanjing to Guangzhou, Chongqing, and Chengdu, and in December 1949 it moved to Taipei. Remnant armies withdrew from Fujian, Guangdong, and Zhejiang to Penghu, Keelung, and Kaohsiung. Roughly a million or more soldiers, officials, teachers, police, technicians, scholars, and their families came to Taiwan between 1945 and the early 1950s. The intelligence services came with them.

Communist underground cells had also been spreading in Taiwan since 1947, through student clubs, labor groups, and underground propaganda. They were small, but enough to alarm the government. On May 19, 1949, the Taiwan Provincial Garrison Command declared martial law, effective the next day. It would last until July 15, 1987, thirty-eight years.

In June 1950 the Korean War broke out, and President Truman sent the U.S. Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait. A Communist invasion was no longer feasible. The Nationalist government, a refugee regime months earlier, found itself a frontline Cold War ally. Without the Korean War, Taiwan might well have fallen, and martial law would not have lasted for decades.

2) Martial Law

Martial law was not a temporary emergency measure. It was a system of rule that reached into every part of life, giving the military, the intelligence services, and the government nearly unlimited power. Its surface was calm; underneath was repression. Constitutional rights were effectively suspended, military law took precedence, and national security became the highest law. Military courts tried civilians. Searches, arrests, and interrogations could happen without warrants. Every assembly, association, publication, and speech required permission, and anyone could be arrested for "endangering national security." Breaking the law was no longer an objective standard. It meant the state judging you dangerous.

At the center stood the Taiwan Garrison Command. It controlled censorship, household registration and travel, surveillance and interrogation, political control in schools and universities, the pursuit of underground organizations, and the prosecution of political cases. Household registration recorded each family's members, relations, occupations, and, according to memoirs and later research, political leanings. Universities and high schools had military instructors who monitored student clubs, vetted lectures and events, and reported "suspicious remarks." Factories, schools, and government offices had informants. Students and teachers learned not to trust one another.

Nothing public appeared freely. From 1951 no new newspaper licenses were issued and the number of pages was capped. Books, plays, films, songs, and even advertising copy could be banned, and publications from abroad were inspected at the border. Letters might be opened. Travel abroad was tightly restricted. People did not talk politics in public, and at home they lowered their voices. The Mandarin-only policy banned Taiwanese Hokkien, Hakka, and Indigenous languages in schools and public settings, and children were punished for speaking them. History teaching insisted that this was the Republic of China and that it would retake the mainland. Local memory, the experience of Japanese rule, and Taiwanese identity were systematically pushed aside.

Politically, martial law produced a party-state. Apart from the Kuomintang there were only two small "flower-vase" parties. Members of the national legislature, elected on the mainland in 1947–48, kept their seats for life because new national elections could not be held until the mainland was retaken. New parties were banned, elections were tightly managed, and the media answered to the party. Opponents were not debated. They were arrested.

Two cases show how the system worked. Lei Chen, co-founder of the magazine Free China (自由中國), was a moderate liberal who called for constitutional government, an end to corruption, and real democracy. In 1960, as he worked with Taiwanese local politicians to form an opposition party, he was arrested, charged with harboring a Communist spy and spreading sedition, and sentenced to ten years; the magazine was shut down. In the NTU Philosophy Department Incident (1972–1975), a campus forum on nationalism led to accusations that philosophy lecturers such as Chen Gu-ying and Wang Hsiao-po were spreading Communist ideas. Over three years, thirteen faculty members were dismissed or forced out. A 1993 investigation acknowledged the injustice. Some were reinstated around 1998. No one responsible was ever punished.

3) From Zhongli to Kaohsiung: The One-Party State Begins to Crack

On November 19, 1977, Taoyuan County held its election for county magistrate. Hsu Hsin-liang, expelled from the Kuomintang for running without its nomination, was popular locally, and the race drew national attention. That afternoon, voters at Polling Station 213 at Zhongli Elementary School accused the supervising official, the school's principal Fan-Chiang Hsin-lin, of spoiling ballots cast for Hsu. When a prosecutor arrived, he took away the people who had reported the fraud and left the principal in place. To the crowd, this was the courts and the administration protecting the ruling party.

The news spread fast through Zhongli. More residents came to the polling station, scuffles with police broke out, and by late afternoon stones were being thrown. The protest moved to the Zhongli police station, and by evening thousands of people surrounded it. For martial-law Taiwan, an election protest on this scale was almost unheard of. Some in the crowd stoned the station and wrecked police cars. Tear gas failed to disperse them. After seven that evening, police opened fire. Two people died: Chiang Wen-kuo, a student at National Central University, and Chang Chih-ping, a nineteen-year-old from Zhongli. Another young man was badly wounded. Who gave the order to fire, and who pulled the trigger, has never been settled and is now a subject of transitional justice investigations. Later that night the police withdrew, and the station was set on fire. The blaze destroyed the main building, the police dormitory, and nearby facilities.

Official reports called it a riot. Later scholarship sees the eruption of long-building grievances: unfair elections, failed legal process, a collapse of trust between government and citizens, and anger that authoritarian rule had kept down for years. The authorities let the result stand, and Hsu won decisively, with about 230,000 votes to his opponent's 140,000. Zhongli was the first large-scale postwar protest over election fraud, and it exposed how thin the legitimacy of Taiwan's "limited elections" had become. It is widely seen as the prelude to the Kaohsiung Incident and the street movements of the 1980s.

By the late 1970s, a loose opposition had formed outside the Kuomintang, known as the dangwai (黨外, "outside the party"): independent candidates, lawyers, journalists, and professors, along with local movements on the environment, labor, and language. Its central forum was Formosa (美麗島, Meilidao) magazine. On December 10, 1979, International Human Rights Day, the magazine organized a rally in Kaohsiung under the slogan of democracy and human rights. The authorities had refused a permit. Police sealed off the area, plainclothes agents mingled with the crowd, and the Garrison Command and intelligence units watched every dangwai leader. Thousands came from across the south. That evening, as leaders addressed the crowd, police moved in with tear gas and riot shields. Protesters fought back with sticks and stones, and dozens of people and police were injured.

The government called it a violent rebellion instigated by the Communists. Starting December 13, it raided the magazine's offices and arrested almost every dangwai leader. Eight were tried before a military court in the spring of 1980 on charges of sedition: Huang Hsin-chieh, Shih Ming-teh, Yao Chia-wen, Chang Chun-hung, Lin Yi-hsiung, Lin Hung-hsuan, Annette Lu, and Chen Chu. Dozens more were tried in civilian courts. American media, members of Congress, and human rights groups such as Amnesty International protested. The government, caught between keeping control and avoiding isolation, opened the military trial to the press, and newspapers printed the proceedings at length. Shih Ming-teh was sentenced to life, Huang Hsin-chieh to fourteen years, and the other six to twelve. The effect backfired. The public saw the democracy movement's leaders for the first time and heard their arguments in the newspapers. Several of the defense lawyers, including Chen Shui-bian, Frank Hsieh, and Su Tseng-chang, went on to lead the next generation of the movement. Repression had turned the defendants into symbols of democracy.

During the pretrial period, on February 28, 1980, the anniversary of the 228 Incident, Lin Yi-hsiung's mother and his seven-year-old twin daughters were stabbed to death in broad daylight at the family home in Taipei, which was under state surveillance at the time. His eldest daughter survived severe wounds. The killer has never been found, and many Taiwanese believe it was political intimidation. The following July, Chen Wen-chen, a Taiwanese assistant professor of statistics at Carnegie Mellon University who had supported the democracy movement from abroad, was taken in for questioning by the Garrison Command during a visit home. The next morning his body was found on the campus of National Taiwan University. The government called it suicide. The evidence never supported that.

The dangwai regrouped. Its members organized press conferences, legal teams, magazines, and campaign organizations. Formosa was banned, but its influence endured, and new magazines kept appearing, and being banned, as outlets for opposition thought. Then, on October 15, 1984, Henry Liu, a Chinese-American writer who had published a critical biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, was shot dead at his home in Daly City, California, by members of the Bamboo Union gang acting on orders from the director of Taiwan's Military Intelligence Bureau. The FBI traced the killing back to Taipei. It became one of the worst international scandals of the authoritarian era, provoking congressional hearings and heavy pressure from Washington. Chiang Ching-kuo had to rein in and reorganize the intelligence services, and the reformers inside the party gained ground.

4) Chiang Ching-kuo and the Road to Reform

Chiang Ching-kuo was born in 1910 in Xikou, Fenghua, the son of Chiang Kai-shek and his first wife, Mao Fumei. In 1925, at fifteen, he went to study at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, a school for training Chinese revolutionary cadres, where he received a Marxist-Leninist education. When his father broke with the Communists in 1927, he publicly denounced him, and Stalin kept him in the Soviet Union as a kind of hostage for twelve years. He did factory work, was sent to a collective farm and to Siberia, lived in poverty, and saw Soviet totalitarianism from the inside. The experience gave him a deep understanding of intelligence services, a belief in tight organization, acute sensitivity to power, and distrust of political idealism. In 1935 he married a Russian factory worker, Faina Vakhreva, who later went with him to Taiwan and lived a notably quiet life as Chiang Fang-liang.

He returned to China in 1937. From 1939 he ran the Gannan region of southern Jiangxi, where his "New Gannan" program of iron-handed reform made his reputation, both admiring and fearful. In 1948 he led a failed campaign in Shanghai against inflation and profiteering. In Taiwan in the 1950s and 1960s, he oversaw the intelligence and security apparatus. He was not solely responsible, but he was at the top of it, and the machinery of the White Terror, arrests without explanation, torture, and military trials, was closely tied to his security strategy.

He was also a driver of Taiwan's economic development. He brought his Soviet-style cadre management to industrialization, recruited technocrats, launched the Ten Major Construction Projects in highways, ports, power, and heavy industry, promoted export-led growth, and cracked down on corruption. The combination of political control and technocratic management helped Taiwan grow fast. But he also consolidated the party-state, controlled the media, refused to hold elections for the national legislature, suppressed the dangwai, and kept martial law in place. He became premier in 1972, was effectively in charge after his father's death in 1975, and became president in 1978.

The decisions of his last years changed Taiwan's history. The Kaohsiung Incident showed him that Taiwanese society had modernized and its urban middle class had awakened, and that more repression would only deepen the crisis. The Henry Liu killing brought American fury down on the security services. He also knew that he was ill and that no Chiang would follow him. To keep the regime alive after him, and to keep the Kuomintang from being swept away, he chose to release the pressure, control the pace of change, rebuild the party's legitimacy, bring Taiwanese and social forces into politics, and repair Taiwan's image abroad. These motives carried him toward an outcome he may never have intended: institutional democracy.

On September 28, 1986, dangwai leaders met at the Grand Hotel in Taipei. The meeting had been called to endorse candidates for the December legislative elections, and the ban on new parties was still in force. Instead, those present voted to found a party, the Democratic Progressive Party. About 130 people signed on. Reporters were there, security agents watched from nearby, and no one was arrested. Technically the act was illegal. The government chose to let it stand. On November 10, 1986, at its first party congress, the DPP adopted its charter and platform, built around democratic constitutional government, human rights, political reform, and local self-rule, and elected its first chairman, the human rights lawyer Chiang Peng-chien.

5) The End of Martial Law

The pressures that ended martial law had been building since the early 1970s.

On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 2758, recognizing the People's Republic of China as "the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations" and expelling "the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek." The resolution did not address Taiwan's legal status. It settled the question of representation, not sovereignty. But the Republic of China lost its seats in the UN system. This was the result of several shifts at once. Decolonization had brought dozens of new Asian and African states into the UN, changing it from a body centered on the wartime Allies into one with a Third World majority, and many of these states recognized Beijing. At the same time, the Cold War was shifting. Mired in Vietnam and seeing the Sino-Soviet split, the United States wanted Beijing as a counterweight to Moscow. In July 1971, during a visit to Pakistan, Henry Kissinger slipped away to Beijing in secret to meet Zhou Enlai, keeping the trip hidden from most of the State Department, from Taipei, and from most allies. The ROC government, for its part, refused compromises such as dual representation or a seat for "Taiwan" alone. In Chiang Kai-shek's logic, giving up the claim to represent China meant giving up the regime's legitimacy, so it was better to leave. The ROC withdrew before the final vote.

In February 1972, Richard Nixon visited China and met Mao Zedong. In the Shanghai Communiqué, the United States "acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China," and stated that it "does not challenge that position." The careful wording left Washington room to maneuver. On January 1, 1979, the United States established diplomatic relations with the PRC and cut them with the ROC, replacing formal ties with the Taiwan Relations Act that April.

Together, these blows knocked out the three pillars of the regime's official story: that it represented China, that it had a historic mission to retake the mainland, and that the world would stand with it in the end. The state survived, but for the first time society had to face the question of whom the government represented, and on what basis. If it no longer represented China, what gave it the right to govern Taiwan? Legitimacy began to shift from being "the lawful government of China" to whether the government answered to the society it actually ruled.

American policy was changing too. In the 1950s and 1960s, Washington judged allies mainly by whether they were anti-Communist. Military dictatorship, decades of martial law, and systematic repression were overlooked in Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Vietnam alike. In the 1970s, defeat in Vietnam, Watergate, and the civil rights movement changed American political culture. Suspicion of abuses of power rose, and human rights became a working language of foreign policy. Congress began requiring annual State Department human rights reports on countries receiving aid, and the Carter administration made human rights an explicit part of its diplomacy. This was less a moral awakening than a change in political culture and in how government worked. For Taiwan it meant American support was no longer unconditional. Repression now had diplomatic costs, and political prisoners came up in bilateral talks. The international outcry over the Kaohsiung trial would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Chiang Ching-kuo's government came to understand that the United States would no longer underwrite harsh rule, and that continued repression would only shrink Taiwan's room in the world.

Taiwan's own society had also changed. From the 1960s it turned to export-led industrialization, drawing in foreign capital and building up manufacturing, with the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone, opened in 1966, as the model. The state controlled land, credit, and labor, kept wages low, and kept unions weak, trading political stability for growth. The model worked in the short run but transformed society in the long run. Farming gave way to industry, young people moved to the cities, and the influence of clans and local notables faded. Factories, industrial parks, and office work replaced ties of blood and place with professional and social networks. People lived on wages and skills, not political loyalty or state patronage.

A middle class grew up: engineers, civil servants, teachers, technicians, office workers. They did not depend on backroom politics and did not want revolution, but they found total control harder and harder to accept. They wanted predictable rules, professional dignity, and room to speak. The expansion of education reinforced this. More universities opened, and large numbers of students went to the United States and Europe, where they saw elections, civil society, and free speech. Even those who never opposed the regime knew the world did not have to work this way.

Between 1980 and 1987, the loosening was already happening in practice. Political prisoners had sentences reduced or were released, the security services stopped sweeping arrests, and not every opposition magazine was banned. The DPP's founding in 1986, and the government's decision to tolerate it, showed that the boundaries had moved. In October 1986, Chiang Ching-kuo told Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham that martial law would be lifted. On July 15, 1987, it formally ended after thirty-eight years, at the time the longest period of martial law in the world. It was replaced by a National Security Law that kept some restrictions. On January 1, 1988, the ban on new newspapers was lifted, and within weeks new papers appeared and different political positions could be argued in public. Chiang Ching-kuo died on January 13, 1988. By then the government no longer held a monopoly on explaining reality, and authoritarian rule had lost its final hold over the story Taiwanese society told about itself. 🇹🇼