This path-breaking and authoritative book describes how political power was centralized in Taiwan between 1949 and 1956, creating an authoritarian political entity that reformed the landowning system. That new entity was the Kuomintang, or National People's Party, the force responsible for transforming Taiwan into a modern industrial society and a successful democracy.
Between 1950 and 1952, the aging dictator, Chiang Kai-shek, and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, built a new political party, unlike any previously seen in China, that created institutions to increase its citizens' “life chances.” For example, property rights were redistributed so that poor labourers and tenants could obtain lands to either farm or convert to cash to finance their training or other entrepreneurial ventures. To oversee the programme, the party and state created such institutions as land registration agencies, a land bank, and a new system of landownership. To accomplish all this, the Kuomintang concentrated its power in the two Chiang leaders.
Matsuda constructs six narratives describing how the two Chiangs and their loyal party members successfully co-ordinated and directed political power to accomplish major reforms and strengthen the new party's roots in Taiwanese society. The final chapter explains how the new technocrats used their skill, experience and political power, to carry out multiple stages of land reform.
As Matsuda writes in the first narrative, Chiang Kai-shek first decided that his new party must make his leadership central to Taiwan's new polity. He removed those party leaders he saw as responsible for the factionalism he had deplored on the mainland, giving them honorary positions that carried no political authority. To fulfil Chiang's objective of a party membership unafraid of innovative policies, he needed dedicated, loyal party members of whom he would be their ultimate leader (along with his loyal son). He thus formed a leadership committee of 15 to 20 party members who swore loyalty to Chiang and agreed with him that the new party's goal was recovering the China mainland under the Republic of China's constitution.
Chiang also created a political academy at which all party members underwent intensive study and self-examination so as to internalize those principles that called for building a “revolutionary democratic party.” From 1950 to 1952 the father–son leaders saw their most loyal members assigned to leading government positions. Party members also now shared a common ideological doctrine: to implement Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People by transforming Taiwan into a revolutionary democracy.
Matsuda's second narrative involves the new state and party relationship under which the Kuomintang and its supreme leader called for recovering the mainland by “having the party use indirect means to guide the government's leadership role.” Centralizing the Kuomintang's power depended on its control of state and party policies. This meant, on the one hand, that local government was to be controlled by central organs of the state. On the other hand, Chinese mainlanders and Taiwanese had begun developing local factions just as the new democratization process was beginning to rise out of the island's political grass roots.
The third narrative describes the party trying to exercise its control over regions. Before the war, the party had been unable to expand the recruitment of members because of spreading corruption and a persistent shortage of party funds. In 1950, however, Kuomintang members were able to increase their regional party networks because by then the Kuomintang was the only party. The local elections that began in 1950 attracted regional leaders to either join the Kuomintang or build networks with the party. Regional politics were thus able to become more competitive as party factions learned how to win elections.
The fourth narrative is how the party reformed its relationship with the military. Chiang and his son wanted a strong military to preserve Taiwan's security. That action required readjusting budget allocations and altering training programmes for improving the quality of officers and non-commissioned officers. They also wanted the military purified by Sun's doctrine so as to avoid the weakening military morals. Imbedding the party in the military became one of Chiang's top national security goals.
The fifth narrative is the military's developing a secret service that would monitor not only citizens but any organization suspected of having links to political opponents. Its role, then, was to root out any opponents of the regime, especially those advocating Taiwan's independence from mainland China, should the communist regime there collapse. Both Chiangs agreed that Chiang Ching-kuo would control the secret service.
Taiwan's political centralization was very different from the political decentralization that had been evolving on the mainland in the 1930s and 1940s. Taiwan's centralization process had the power to monitor its society, as well as punish and terrify its people, should they cross the line that separated inappropriate civil thoughts and behaviour from appropriate ones. That meant no tolerance of Communists and independence-type politicians forming underground political organizations. There was to be no public criticism of the Kuomintang and its leaders that might put the regime in jeopardy.
The sixth narrative describes how the new system was able to undertake socioeconomic reforms, such as the huge land reform implemented by local officials, party members, and state agencies. Such a reform is especially laudatory when you consider that effective land reform had failed on the mainland and under the old Republic of China. After 1949, however, Taiwan's new party and state leadership explained to rural people that the new reforms were to be based on fairness and independent choice. Land reform was a brilliant success, giving rise to a major redeployment of people from villages to cities. As urbanization spread, employment increased, as did educational opportunities.
By 1965, the new political regime had stabilized. Taiwan's new leaders were pouring funds into the educational system and working to meld Taiwan into a new Chinese society. The state began offering birth control to slow down its rapid population growth. Thus party and state policy making were becoming pragmatically focused on increasing people's life chances.
The centralization of political power in both state and party was accomplished successfully during the 1950s. Then, in subsequent decades, the party's authoritarian control gradually relaxed. Finally, in May 1986, martial law was abolished by Chiang Ching-kuo. The party-state had been very wary of opening society too quickly.
Only after martial law ended did the regime rapidly expand the national electoral system by allowing political parties to form and compete. The Kuomintang still retained its power in the 1990s, but a quiet political revolution had been taking place. In spring of 2000, Chiang's party system was finally replaced by an opposition party. That new party and its new political leadership demanded public debate of the pros and cons of Taiwan's ethnic identity and continued its strong dislike of the Kuomintang. But in the ensuing eight years, Taiwan's society became more corrupt and less capable of producing wealth than the former Kuomintang.
Matsuda's book is a wonderful source to understand how the Kuomintang party and state organizations conducted their transactions, including how they gathered intelligence so as to restrict corruption and allow more people to go abroad for visitation, employment, and study.
The book's six political narratives rely on copious source materials for individual biographies and party and state organizational activities. Although the Kuomintang's files began expanding in the 1950s and 1960s, the author was unable to examine them until they were opened in the last few years.
Matsuda has brilliantly explicated why the new party failed before 1949 and succeeded afterward. His portrait of Chiang Kai-shek reveals a leader of great determination and charisma. Although Chiang failed to unify Taiwan with the mainland, he succeeded in creating a modern Chinese political party that used its authoritarian governance to give Taiwan's people the opportunities they needed to build productive lives.
