Taiwan

Abstract

According to Hung-mao Tien (1989), “From 1949 to 1986, the ruling KMT had a virtual monopoly of power on the island” (64). Through an expansive network of political commissars, members, party cells, and informants extending into all levels of the government administration, military, police forces, schools, mass organizations, and the media, the KMT established firm political control over society and the state (68, 71–72). Similar to other Leninist-style regimes, real political decision-making power in the pre-transition ROC was heavily concentrated in the Standing Committee of the Central Committee of the KMT, whose orders were transmitted through a complex hierarchy of committees and chairmen extending from the national to grassroots level (Copper 1981b, 365; Tien 1989, p 73). The KMT party apparatus “parallel[ed] or shadow[ed] governmental organization at all levels” (Copper 1981b, 365). The regime followed the central organizational patterns exhibited by Leninist party-states of the communist bloc and at every level of the state, the party penetrated and interlocked with the formal government administration. Until the rapid acceleration of social mobilization during the early to mid-1980s, this single-party authoritarian structure proved particularly robust, adept at effectively identifying and crushing or marginalizing sources of opposition to the regime.