From Insulation to Embeddedness: The Nativization of the Émigré Regime in Cold War Taiwan (1950–1972)

Ching-Huan Kuo, University of Texas at Austin

Bellicose theories of state formation posit that representative institutions emerge as a trade-off for increased taxation during wartime. Thus, where state formation sidesteps the evolutionary process of war-making and state-making, representation born of population mobilization fails to transpire. This paper focuses on Cold War East Asia, where strong states emerged after the dissolution of the Japanese empire; yet, despite constant preparations for war, their regimes remained exclusionary. I argue that external military patrons strengthened client states’ despotic power and allowed their regimes to sidestep routine negotiation with civil society. Drawing on the case of postwar Taiwan, I examine how the émigré Kuomintang (KMT) regime, shielded by U.S. protection, marginalized the majority “local Taiwanese” population and prevented it from acquiring political power during the 1950s and 1960s. Using a newly constructed dataset of 730 elites, I analyze how the institutional positions of individuals incorporated into the higher echelons of the party-state interacted with U.S. foreign policy. I show that the KMT insulated itself from society in the early 1960s and further deepened the exclusion of local Taiwanese following the termination of U.S. military aid in 1965. However, the strategic reorientation of U.S. foreign policy and the region’s demilitarization beginning in 1969 prompted the KMT to selectively form embedded alliances with local actors and partially nativize its elite recruitment. Drawing on archival data from the KMT Central Standing Committee (CSC), I demonstrate the interstitial emergence of the party’s institutional strength vis-à-vis the military, which was functional to the regime’s embeddedness in society through electoral mobilization of societal sectors and through rank-and-file co-optation programs that recruited local Taiwanese as party cadres. As the patron-client network with the United States became deinstitutionalized, the KMT’s initially militarist state-making project transformed into one of limited representation.

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 Presented in Session 214. Émigré Regimes, Diaspora Mobilization, and Underground Resistance