Preface: completed in collaboration with ChatGPT.

On October 25, 1971, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, recognizing the government of the People’s Republic of China as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and deciding to expel “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” from the UN system. The text of the resolution itself did not address the international legal status of Taiwan, nor did it determine sovereignty over Taiwan. It resolved the issue of representation, not territorial ownership. Nevertheless, in institutional terms, the Republic of China was thereafter entirely excluded from the United Nations system.

This outcome was not an isolated event, but the result of multiple structural shifts converging. From the 1950s through the 1960s, the wave of decolonization brought a large number of newly independent Asian and African states into the United Nations. The organization’s membership gradually transformed from a postwar alliance-centered body into one dominated numerically by what was then called the Third World. Many of these new member states chose to recognize the government in Beijing and rejected the claim that Taiwan could represent all of China. Within this altered voting structure, the Republic of China increasingly found itself in a minority position.

Changes in the Cold War strategic environment further accelerated this shift. By the late 1960s, the United States was deeply entangled in the Vietnam War, while relations between the Soviet Union and China had deteriorated sharply. Under these conditions, Washington began reassessing its Asia strategy and sought rapprochement with Beijing as a means of counterbalancing Moscow. In July 1971, Henry Kissinger secretly traveled to Beijing via Islamabad, under the pretext of visiting Pakistan, and held talks with Zhou Enlai. At the time, this initiative was kept secret from most of the U.S. State Department, the Taiwanese government, and even many American allies, marking the substantive breakthrough in Sino–American relations.

In February 1972, President Richard Nixon formally visited China, meeting Mao Zedong and issuing the Shanghai Communiqué. In that document, the United States stated that it “acknowledges” the Chinese position that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China, while deliberately avoiding the word “recognize,” thereby preserving strategic ambiguity. The U.S. position was that it would not challenge this claim, while Beijing accepted that Washington would maintain non-official relations with Taiwan in the short term.

At the same time, the Republic of China government rejected compromise proposals such as “dual representation” or participation in the UN as a Taiwan-only entity. For Chiang Kai-shek, relinquishing the claim to represent China would have amounted to negating the regime’s foundational legitimacy. From this perspective, accepting a downgraded status was worse than complete withdrawal. This choice effectively foreclosed Taiwan’s continued presence within the UN system.

By the late 1970s, this narrative framework had undergone a fundamental collapse. The loss of the UN seat in 1971 and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People’s Republic of China in 1979—accompanied by Washington’s severance of official ties with the Republic of China—brought down the three pillars that had long sustained Taiwan’s official self-narrative: that it represented China, that retaking the mainland remained a historical mission, and that the international community would ultimately stand behind it. The state still existed, but questions of “who we represent” and “on what basis we rule” became unavoidable within society for the first time.

This shift undermined the international legitimacy of the mainland-origin ruling elite. Within Taiwanese society, a new question began to surface: if you no longer represent China, on what grounds do you represent Taiwan itself? The source of political legitimacy began to shift from the claim of being the “legitimate Chinese government” toward responsiveness to local society.

At the same time, the external policy environment in the United States was changing. During the 1950s and 1960s, Washington’s primary criterion for evaluating allies was whether they were anti-communist. As long as that condition was met, military dictatorships, prolonged martial law, and systematic repression were largely tolerated or ignored. Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines, and South Vietnam all fit this pattern. In the 1970s, however, the United States experienced the trauma of defeat in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, and the aftershocks of the civil rights movement. American political culture shifted toward greater suspicion of unchecked power, and human rights gradually became a language that could be institutionalized in foreign policy.

Under the Carter administration, human rights were explicitly incorporated into the formal framework of U.S. diplomacy. The State Department began issuing regular human rights reports, and Congress required the executive branch to submit assessments of allied governments as well. This was not a sudden moral awakening, but the result of a transformation in political culture and governance logic. For Taiwan, it meant that U.S. support was no longer unconditional: repression now carried diplomatic costs, and political prisoners became points of bilateral friction.

The 1979 Kaohsiung (Formosa) Incident drew the attention of American media, members of Congress, and human rights organizations—an outcome unimaginable in the 1950s. The Chiang Ching-kuo government gradually recognized that the United States would no longer provide blanket cover for repression. The harsher the crackdown, the narrower Taiwan’s international space would become. Human rights scrutiny was not a passing wave, but a long-term constraint.

Meanwhile, Taiwan’s internal social structure had already undergone profound transformation. Beginning in the 1960s, Taiwan shifted toward export-oriented industrialization, attracting foreign investment and developing processing and manufacturing industries. Textiles, electronics, and components manufacturing expanded rapidly, with the Kaohsiung Export Processing Zone as a flagship example. The state dominated land, finance, and labor allocation, tightly controlled unions, and suppressed labor costs in exchange for political stability and investor confidence. This model was highly efficient in the short term but carried long-term structural consequences.

As Taiwan moved from an agrarian to an industrial society, agricultural incomes declined relative to wages, and large numbers of young people migrated to cities. The influence of clans and local gentry weakened. Factories, science parks, and urban office systems reoriented social relationships away from kinship and locality toward occupational, collegial, and social networks. People increasingly lived on wages and skills rather than political loyalty or state distribution.

The middle class expanded accordingly, encompassing engineers, civil servants, teachers, technicians, and white-collar professionals. They were neither capitalists nor peasants, and their defining features were stable income, transferable skills, and relative independence from opaque political patronage. They did not seek revolution, but they could not accept total control. What they demanded were predictable rules, professional dignity, and space for expression. They were not violent or insurrectionary, but they persistently resisted ideological domination.

Educational expansion reinforced these changes. Universities multiplied, enrollment surged, and large numbers of students studied in the United States and Europe, encountering electoral politics, civil society, and freedom of expression. Even if they did not actively oppose the regime, they understood that the world could operate differently. Livelihoods increasingly depended on markets and enterprises rather than the state, and income flowed from wages and expertise rather than political loyalty.

Between 1980 and 1987, significant political change had already taken place in practice. Political prisoners were granted sentence reductions or released, and the security apparatus ceased its indiscriminate arrests. Opposition magazines were no longer uniformly banned. Most notably, the Democratic Progressive Party was founded in 1986 and not suppressed, marking a substantive loosening of institutional boundaries. On July 15, 1987, the Republic of China government formally lifted martial law, which had been in effect since 1949 for 38 years—one of the longest continuous periods of martial law in Asia at the time.

With the end of martial law, new newspapers were legally established, divergent political positions entered the public sphere, and the government lost its monopoly over defining reality. At this point, authoritarian rule also lost its exclusive control over social narrative.