Preface: completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

On October 25, 1971, the United Nations adopted Resolution 2758, which recognized the People’s Republic of China as the only legitimate representative of China at the United Nations and decided to expel the representatives of the Republic of China. The text of the resolution made no mention of Taiwan’s status; it merely determined who represented China, not to whom Taiwan belonged. Whether this was a matter of semantic maneuvering or not, the outcome was clear: the Republic of China formally withdrew from the United Nations.

The background to this decision was straightforward. During the 1950s and 1960s, a large number of newly independent countries in Asia and Africa joined the United Nations. Most of these states recognized Beijing and rejected the claim that Taiwan could represent all of China. As a result, the UN transformed from a postwar alliance club into a political arena dominated by the Third World. Within this new voting structure, the Republic of China became a minority.

The Cold War and the resulting shift in U.S. strategy further accelerated this change. At the time, the United States was deeply mired in the Vietnam War, while relations between the Soviet Union and China had deteriorated. Washington sought to draw Beijing closer in order to counterbalance Moscow. In 1972, Henry Kissinger made a secret visit to China. Officially, he was traveling to Pakistan; in reality, he claimed to have fallen ill in Islamabad and secretly flew to Beijing. His counterpart in these talks was Zhou Enlai. Most officials in the U.S. State Department, the Taiwanese government, and America’s allies were kept completely in the dark.

During these talks, the United States acknowledged the position that there was only one China and stated that it would not challenge Beijing’s position on Taiwan. In return, Beijing agreed not to demand that the United States immediately sever all relations with Taiwan.

In February 1972, President Richard Nixon visited China and met with Mao Zedong. The Shanghai Communiqué stated that the United States acknowledged China’s position, deliberately using acknowledge rather than recognize. While the U.S. declared that it would not challenge the claim that Taiwan was part of China, it deliberately left room for diplomatic ambiguity. At the same time, the Republic of China rejected compromise proposals such as dual representation or “one China, one Taiwan,” and refused to accept a status that would allow it to represent Taiwan alone. Chiang Kai-shek’s position was clear: losing the right to represent China would amount to denying the legitimacy of his regime, and under such circumstances, total withdrawal was preferable.

At this point, Taiwan’s official narrative suffered a fatal blow. The previous narrative rested on three pillars: that Taiwan represented China, that the loss of the mainland was only temporary, and that retaking the mainland was a historical mission. After this series of events, all three collapsed simultaneously. The state still existed, but for the first time, the public realized that the world was not on their side and that international rules were not moral arbiters. The rhetoric of “anti-communism and national salvation” began to sound hollow and outdated.

The ruling elite—those who had retreated to Taiwan after the Chinese Civil War and monopolized political power—began to lose their international legitimacy. Native Taiwanese increasingly asked: if you no longer represent China, on what grounds do you represent us? Why should we not be represented by people rooted in this island?

The United States no longer offered unconditional backing to Taiwan’s authoritarian rule, and human rights emerged as a new diplomatic language. In the 1950s and 1960s, Washington’s only criterion for its allies was simple: were they anti-communist? As long as they were, the United States largely turned a blind eye to military dictatorships, prolonged martial law, repression by security agencies, and the widespread existence of political prisoners. Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Vietnam all followed the same logic.

By the 1970s, however, the defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the aftershocks of the civil rights movement triggered deep reflection within the United States: fatigue with anti-communism at any cost, growing suspicion of abuses of power, and the institutionalization of rights-based discourse. Human rights became a language that could be openly deployed in American foreign policy. This was not a sudden moral awakening, but a shift in political culture.

Between 1977 and 1982, human rights were formally written into U.S. foreign policy. Jimmy Carter was the first American president to explicitly elevate human rights to a core diplomatic value—not merely in rhetoric, but through institutionalization. This included the establishment of human rights reporting mechanisms within the State Department and congressional requirements that the executive branch submit reports on human rights conditions in other countries, including allies.

Under Carter’s logic, the United States no longer cared only whether Taiwan was anti-communist, but also how it treated its own people. American support for Taiwan was downgraded: no longer unconditional, but conditional and costly. Political repression in Taiwan would be recorded in U.S. human rights reports; military trials would be singled out by Congress; and political prisoners would become sources of diplomatic friction. The external costs of authoritarian rule rose significantly.

The 1979 Kaohsiung (Formosa) Incident drew the attention of U.S. media, prompted questioning by members of Congress, and invited intervention by human rights organizations—developments that would have been unthinkable in the 1950s. Chiang Ching-kuo’s government came to understand that the United States would no longer provide cover for repression. The harsher the crackdown, the narrower Taiwan’s diplomatic space would become. Human rights pressure was not a passing trend but a long-term condition. Continued high-pressure rule would result in international self-isolation.

Even before this, in the 1960s, Taiwan had abandoned an inward-looking economic model in favor of attracting foreign investment, developing export-oriented manufacturing, and taking on international orders in textiles, electronics, and components. The Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone was emblematic of this shift. The state directed land, finance, and labor allocation, tightly controlled unions, and suppressed labor costs, offering political stability in exchange for foreign investment. This model was highly efficient but offered extremely limited participation. It succeeded in the short term but, over time, structurally undermined political control.

Taiwan moved from an agrarian society to an industrial one. Agricultural incomes declined relative to industrial wages, and large numbers of young people migrated to cities. The influence of clans and local elites weakened. Factories, science parks, and urban office systems restructured social relations away from blood ties and local networks toward professional, workplace-based, and social networks. People began to live on wages rather than personal connections or state allocations.

The middle class expanded. This class consisted not of capitalists or farmers, but of engineers, civil servants, teachers, technicians, and white-collar administrators. Their shared characteristics included stable incomes, transferable skills, and relative independence from opaque political patronage. They did not need revolution, but they could not accept total control. What they demanded were predictable rules, professional dignity, and space for expression. They were neither violent nor rebellious, yet they persistently resisted ideological domination.

At the same time, education levels rose dramatically. Higher education expanded, universities multiplied, and enrollment in both STEM fields and the social sciences surged. Large numbers of students studied in the United States and Europe, where they encountered elections, civil society, and freedom of speech. They did not necessarily oppose the regime, but they knew that the world could be different. People were no longer entirely dependent on the state for survival; income increasingly came from the market. Job opportunities were provided by enterprises rather than the government, and livelihoods were based on wages and skills rather than political loyalty.

Between 1980 and 1987, Taiwan’s political landscape changed significantly. Political prisoners received reduced sentences or were released; security agencies no longer carried out indiscriminate arrests; opposition magazines were no longer universally banned. Most importantly, the Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986 and was not suppressed.

On July 15, 1987, the government of the Republic of China officially announced the abolition of the martial law that had been in effect since 1949, lasting thirty-eight years—one of the longest periods of martial law in Asia at the time. After martial law ended, new newspapers began to appear legally, diverse political positions entered the public sphere, and the government was no longer the sole source of narrative authority. At this point, the state lost its monopoly over the interpretation of reality.