Disciplining Taiwan: The Kuomintang's Methods of Control during the White Terror Era (1947-1987)

Abstract During the White Terror Era in Taiwan, there were only two significant public uprisings that can be considered as disturbances to the reign of the Kuomintang. This article scrutinizes the much neglected theoretical question on Taiwan: how does the Kuomintang dominate the Taiwanese society for more than 50 years without any major coup or revolution attempts? What are the mechanisms of control exercised by the KMT after its retreat from China? This article argues that the theories of discipline, punishment and domination in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish and Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt serve as good elucidation to this important theoretical question and concludes that the success of the KMT domination in Taiwan was due to the party's capabilities to achieve the kinds of changes in society through coercion, education, restructuring the society and creating of a new "identity" and character for the Taiwanese

From Outcast to Established Players - The Transformation of Non-Democratic Parties After Democratization

This dissertation investigates and examine how the Kuomintang hasmanaged to weather critical challenges presented by the liberalization anddemocratization of Taiwan, while maintaining its political presence andconsequently reconsolidating its crushing political dominance by recapturing thepresidential seat and obtaining the most votes any presidential candidate in thehistory of Taiwan has ever captured.The Kuomintang is anything but a pesky insect that refuses to go away.The Kuomintang is a tightly run, self-sustaining, and highly disciplined politicalmachine that is deeply entrenched in all aspects of Taiwanese society throughinstitutions at both the national and local level, as well as through differentdimensions of institutions in the form of the five yuans, electoral rules, and localbureaucracies and representative offices. These institutions are essential to theKuomintang's survival in Taiwan. This mutually engaging and interactiveinstitutional relationship has helped sustain the Kuomintang for more than acentury.The Kuomintang's astonishing political success is a result of thecollaborative, interlocking nature of national institutions, and most importantly,the Kuomintang's deep entrenchment in local institutions, along with theKuomintang's cultivation of clientele and paternalistic social relationships

Authoritarianism in the Living Room: Everyday Disciplines, Senses, and Morality in Taiwan’s Military Villages

With the nationalist government – Kuomintang (KMT) – retreating from mainland China in 1949, some 600,000 military personnel relocated to Taiwan. The military seized former Japanese colonial properties and built its own settlements, establishing temporary military dependents’ villages called juancun (眷村). When the prospect of counter-attacking the mainland vanished, the KMT had to face the reality of settling permanently in Taiwan. How, then, did the KMT’s authoritarian power enter the everyday lives of its own support group? In this article I will focus on the coercive elements of KMT authoritarianism, which permeated these military villages in Taiwan. I will look at the coercive mechanisms through the analytical lens of Foucauldian discipline. I argue that disciplinary techniques such as surveillance, disciplining of the body and the senses, as well as the creation of morality regimes played an important role in the cooptation of village residents into KMT authoritarianism by normalising and naturalising it