Where I strongly disagree with Taylor is his assertion that Chiang’s rule in Taiwan laid the foundation for Taiwan’s prosperity and “set the stage for Taiwan’s development of a vigorous democracy.” This is simply not the case. It can actually be argued that without the presence of the Chiang regime, Taiwan would have fared much better, both in terms of economic development as well as the transition to democracy. Following World War II, Taiwan possessed — because of the Japanese colonial period — a much better infrastructure than had ever existed in China, and would have prospered better if Chiang had not been there to perpetuate his wasteful “recover the mainland” line.
On the issue of democracy: Chiang gave only lip service to this idea to maintain his ties with the successive US governments, but in the meantime continued a repressive one-party dictatorship for several decades. In fact, Taiwan’s momentous transition to democracy in the 1980s was driven by the country’s grassroots democracy movement and came about in spite of vigorous opposition from the ruling KMT. Sadly, at the present time, the successors of this same KMT are — again — disregarding basic democratic principles and causing an erosion of Taiwan’s hard-won human rights, democracy and press freedoms in an apparent attempt to drive Taiwan closer to their old archenemies, the Chinese Communists.
Gerrit van der Wees is the editor of Taiwan Communique.
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