The Transnational Protection Regime and Taiwan's Democratization (original) (raw)
Related papers
2011
This dissertation explains why Taiwan and South Korea experienced democratic breakthrough in the late 1980s, when Singapore failed to do so. It explains this variation in democratic outcomes by specifying the causal mechanisms underpinning the internationaldomestic political interface of democratic development in these cases. New empirical evidence discovered in the course of this research has confirmed that transnational networks of nonstate and substate actors were an indisputable source of external pressures on the authoritarian governments of Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore during the late 1970s and early 80s. Foreign human rights activists, Christian missionaries and ecumenical workers, members of overseas diaspora communities, journalists, academics and students, along with legislators in key democratic countries allied to the target governments, were found to have raised the international profile of political repression by flagging them as reprehensible human rights abuses....
International Journal of China Studies, 2014
In 1949, Kuomintang (KMT) leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek retreated with a significant amount of gold and approximately 2 million Nationalist refugees to the small island of Taiwan where he established a hard-line authoritarian regime, shortly following the 228 Massacre of 1947. The White Terror to which Taiwan was consigned after the massacre was one of the longest martial law periods in world history, as tens of thousands of Taiwanese were imprisoned and executed under the grim eye of the Taiwan Garrison Command secret police body. Who in that era could have predicted the day would come when four decades later President Chiang Ching-kuo (son of Chiang Kai-shek) and Taiwan’s ensuing leaders would successfully facilitate a bloodless and relatively peaceful democratic transition by imposition for their nation and turn the de facto independent island state into one of the most vibrant democracies in the world and a best-case paragon of civil liberties and political rights-respecting free society? With the democracy of Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), continues to stand in intriguing, defiant contrast to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s ruthlessly maintained political monopoly in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland, Taiwan tends to present itself as a perfect textbook validation of the modernization theory, for she has proven to be one of the most successful later industrializers in the history of the twentieth century as well as a “best-case” democracy. When Chiang Ching-kuo’s successor, the native Taiwanese Lee Teng-hui came onto the scene in 1988, modernized Taiwan was ready for his efforts to facilitate her evolution into a full-fledged constitutional democracy. More than twenty years on, today Taiwan has matured into the most democratic free society in East Asia and indeed also one of the most vibrant democracies in the whole of Asia and even the world. https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4jtkocurv8l08l/IJCS-V5N1-yeohForeword.pdf
Taiwan: Democracy, Cross-Strait Relations and Regional Security, 2014
Emile Kok-Kheng Yeoh (focus issue editor) (2014), International Journal of China Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1, April 2014 (Focus – Taiwan: Democracy, Cross-Strait Relations and Regional Security), pp. 1-195 (195 pp. + x). [Scopus - Q1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/mqg4t2eq1kb54xi/IJCS-V5N1-combined-text-cover.pdf
The Shadow of China over Taiwan's Democracy
Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 2017
It may be read, copied and distributed free of charge according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Taiwan in Global International Relations: Rethinking State and Power in a Complex World
Virginia Review of Asian Studies, 2021
Following a call to open up the discipline to different approaches in 2014, Global International Relations (IR) and the post-Western turn it signals quickly became the new direction of IR. In light of Global IR, this article critically reflects on the case of Taiwan and points out that mainstream theories and traditional concepts of the state and power are not useful in describing the status of the island nation and may even be misleading in many senses. This article argues that the case of Taiwan offers a window of opportunity to reflect on the exceptions in IR. Global IR cannot be realized until observers make efforts to examine the exceptional and non-mainstream.
THE GLOBAL CONSTITUTlON OF "TAIWAN DEMOCRACY'" OPENING UP THE IMAGE OF A SUCCESSFUL STATE AFTER 9/11
East Asia, 2003
How Is Taiwan a Successful State? If one asks for a country that represents a model of success in the capitalist world, and is therefore the opposite of neo-Marxist examples of Third World failures, who could possibly miss the case of Taiwan? Although one can safely criticize Taiwan's evident and continuing dependence on the United States for its political as well as economic support, there is no denying that Taiwan has effectively taken advantage of its dependent position.~ Taiwan's recent achievement of political democracy-in addition to its widely lauded economic liberalization and prosperity-has been particularly satisfying to the leadership of the United States. 2 The presidential elections that were held in 1996 and 2000 have further demonstrated that modernization and democracy are not contradictory. Marching in the opposite direction of much critical scholarship, which decries hegemonic U.S. control of the global political economy and is suspicious of globalization, 3 Taiwan seems indisputably to be an arche-typal indicator of the correct historical path of market-oriented democracy .