ABSTRACT
In 1952, an American journalist stationed in Taiwan, H. Maclear Bate, wrote, 'if any Government ever lacked an adequate propaganda organisation, it is Chiang Kai-shek's .... a clever propagandist he said, would find an inexhaustible fund of material in Formosa [Taiwan] which could be capitalized', and he concluded by observing how 'Never has so little been done with so much.' 1
In many respects, Bate was correct. For much of the early Cold War, Taiwan's propaganda lacked sparkle and originality; it did not respond to vacillations in the international environment; and while it depended far too heavily on the United States for material support, failed to heed their advice when offered. The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan even declined to explore sufficiently the opportunities presented by covert propaganda; few of its activities were hidden from view, and its international media even publicized the activities of Taiwan's guerrilla units on the mainland. Remarkably, while most governments sought to hide their special operations, Taiwan was anxious to tell the world. Clearly, the government of the ROC imagined that the security of the operations themselves was less important than the propaganda about them which, as most propagandists will agree, was a reckless assumption.
