The Kuomintang State Apparatus and the Sources of Its Political Order in Taiwan:The Purging of Leftists during the White Terror(1948-1954)
Author: Ching-hsuan Su
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Abstract
The question of why and how the Kuomintang (KMT) could have survived and persisted after it relocated to Taiwan cannot be answered solely by highlighting the role of the United States during the Cold War era. Past studies on KMT state building and the White Terror linked the effectiveness of the KMT state despotic power to the successful outcome of the repression, discarding the theory that excessive state repression might also damage the political legitimacy of a regime and incite wider resistance. So in this article, I probe further by examining how the KMT state apparatus successfully repressed the underground Work Committee of Taiwan Province (WCTP), a sub-organization of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), without provoking opposition from other parts of the society. I used oral histories and official documents to show that the key to the KMT state apparatus’s effective repression was the transformation of the state-society relations during 1950s: when the two political organizations, the KMT and the WCTP/CCP, were in a standoff in 1949, the Taiwanese society as an onlooker had the option to align itself with either of the two sides. However, the advent of the Korean War decisively tilted the balance in favor of the KMT. Taiwanese society could chose to cooperate with the KMT regime, knowing now that the CPP could no longer attack the KMT state due to the U.S. Navy’s presence the Taiwan Strait. Taiwanese society’s change of attitude accelerated the defeat of the WCTP/CCP in Taiwan, which could no longer hide in a society where assistance was nowhere to be found. Abetted by close state-society relations and absent of the need to resort to excessive repression, the KMT was able to solidify its infrastructural power and consolidate the one-party system in Taiwan.