ABSTRACT

Clientelist networks of limited geographical outreach – local factions (difang paixi) – have operated in Taiwan since the early post-war years, shaping Taiwan’s electoral politics for many decades. In the patron–client relationship they had entered into with the Kuomintang (KMT), two or more of these groups vied for electoral offices on the local (later even the national) levels, mobilizing through their networks the votes from local Taiwanese society for KMT candidates, who were in many cases the leaders and members of the factions. The KMT regime, in return, granted the factions political and economic privileges and turned a blind eye to how factional politicians distributed the material benefits of office to members and followers. For the KMT, which was determined to hold free local elections in Taiwan but lacked any social basis there, and having come to the island from the Chinese mainland as refugees after the lost civil war, the local factions were an intermediary to the grass-roots level of Taiwanese society and the arrangement with them was also a means to co-opt local elites.