KMT Authoritarian Era Taiwan

In the aftermath of World War 2 the Japanese colonial authorities and over a hundred thousand settlers were expelled from Taiwan as the Kuomintang (KMT) arrived from China to take control. Tensions between the local populace and the occupying force boiled over in the bloody 228 Incident in 1947, leading to the imposition of martial law in 1949. Later that year the ROC government and over a million soldiers and their dependents retreated to Taiwan, precipitating an acute housing crisis and, in the following years, the hasty construction of hundreds of military dependents’ villages (眷村). The incoming regime imposed a top-down, authoritarian campaign of re-Sinicization; Mandarin replaced Japanese in schools and public life, place names were rewritten to express Chinese Nationalist ideology, and a pervasive cult of personality coalesced around generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Underwriting the regime was a US alliance and aid program that financed land reform, rural extension, and the state-led industrialization later celebrated as the Taiwan Economic Miracle (台灣經濟奇蹟). The Ten Major Construction Projects (十大建設) of the 1970s reshaped the island with expressways, ports, steel mills, and power plants, while island-spanning highways threaded deep into the mountains. All of this unfolded alongside the White Terror, the regime’s sustained campaign of political persecution against communist sympathizers, Taiwanese independence advocates, and ordinary dissidents alike. This theme documents the broader built environment of the era, including the infrastructure, civic architecture, and material imprint of a society on a permanent wartime footing, awaiting a resolution to the Chinese Civil War. Martial law was only lifted in 1987 after a record-setting 38 years.