Party-State Governance
During the martial law era, Taiwan's party-state-military trinity permeated every corner of society. The KMT controlled economic lifelines through party-owned enterprises such as Central Investment Holding, Central Trading and Development, the Broadcasting Corporation of China, and Central Motion Picture — conglomerates whose revenues funded party operations, patronage networks, and cadre training, and whose existence blurred every line between public policy and party interest. It monitored social dynamics through overlapping intelligence agencies that reported back to Chiang Ching-kuo in the 1950s and 1960s, and instilled party-state ideology through a centralized education system in which every classroom displayed the Generalissimo's portrait, every textbook framed Taiwan as a province of China, and every schoolchild recited the KMT-authored "National Anthem" before morning assembly.
The "perpetual parliament" — occupied indefinitely by representatives elected on the mainland in 1947 and frozen in place by a Council of Grand Justices' interpretation that suspended re-elections so long as the mainland was "unrecovered" — symbolized the hollowing out of democratic institutions. By the 1980s, many of these elderly legislators attended sessions in wheelchairs or sent proxies; some had been dead for years but remained on the roster while the party arranged their seats. The perpetual parliament was not a clerical oversight but a deliberate constitutional architecture that kept national-level representation permanently out of Taiwanese voters' reach.
Although local elections — for mayors, county magistrates, provincial assembly members, and township representatives — c…
Although local elections — for mayors, county magistrates, provincial assembly members, and township representatives — continued to be held, under strict party discipline, mobilized voter organizing via the Nationalist-affiliated farmers' associations and fishers' associations, and a dense patronage system that traded party nominations for loyalty and budget allocations, election outcomes were almost entirely controlled by the party machine. The Taiwan Provincial Assembly became one of the few forums where native Taiwanese elites — the so-called "five dragons and one phoenix" of the early assemblies — could publicly question the government, but its formal powers were narrow and its influence was extremely limited; even skilled legislators such as Kuo Yu-hsin or Li Wan-chu were ultimately contained within a system that could always override them.
This volume dissects the operational mechanisms of the martial law regime — from the Taiwan Garrison Command's seditious-publication review boards, overlapping intelligence organizations, and party-owned economic systems, to the Ministry of Education's ideological oversight and the KMT's rolling census of youth through its Salvation Corps youth-leadership program — revealing how authoritarian rule penetrated the very fabric of Taiwanese society, and how its institutional legacies continue to surface in debates over party assets, constitutional revision, and civic education well into the democratic era.
Morning assembly began at seven-thirty: first the national anthem, which had begun life as the Kuomintang party song, then a salute to the portrait of Chiang Kai-shek at the centre of the hall. The notice board at the back of the classroom carried the slogan Guard Secrets, Guard Against Spies. Beside the lectern hung a wooden placard reading I Do Not Speak Dialect; whoever was caught speaking Taiwanese in the corridor wore it until the next offender was found. The textbooks described Taiwan as one province of China, and geography lessons began with the Yangtze and the Yellow River before reaching the Choshui. The teacher was also being assessed. Each term brought forms recording every pupil's conduct and political thinking, and the school's Second Personnel Office reviewed the teachers in turn. A boy who wrote in his diary that the recovery of the mainland would probably never happen had the notebook passed upward; his parents were summoned the following day. The China Youth Anti-Communist National Salvation Corps, founded in 1952 under Chiang Ching-kuo, ran summer combat camps and winter activities, and it fell to the discipline office to meet the enrolment quota. When nine years of compulsory education began in 1968, classes swelled past sixty pupils and the teaching equipment did not follow. The discipline system arrived in the new junior high schools intact.
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