ABSTRACT
The political transformation of the Republic of China on Taiwan, like its economic development, has been nothing short of miraculous. Although emerging from World War II on the winning Allied side, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) on the mainland, led by the Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party), had been severely weakened before the war by years of military expeditions to unify the country by suppressing local warlords. Then, as it achieved a measure of success at economic, social and political development, the ROC was devastated by years of brutal Japanese occupation. This was followed by a resumption of the civil war against the insurgent Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which had been on hiatus, so the two enemies could present a united front against the Japanese invaders. Receiving the former Japanese colony of Taiwan and several offshore islands in 1945 as a postwar prize, the ROC set itself the task of reincorporating the former Qing dynasty province, then a Japanese colony, back into “Chinese” civilization and integrating Taiwan once again as a province into what was now the Republic of China. When it lost the civil war and retreated to the island at the end of 1949, the defeated and demoralized KMT nonetheless determined to make a last stand on Taiwan by installing a brutal martial law regime to mobilize all possible material and human resources for defense against an expected communist invasion, and to prepare it as a base for a counterattack to recover the mainland.
