ABSTRACT
For nearly four decades after retreating from mainland China to Taiwan,
the Kuomintang (KMT, Nationalist Party) was synonymous with ‘ruling
party’ (zhizhengdang) on its island redoubt. By virtue of its organizational
skills, operatives in the military and government, media monopoly, financial and material wealth, and martial law prohibitions against the establishment
of new parties, it enjoyed more-or-less unassailable dominance. When a
stubborn group of dissidents mounted repeated challenges to this dominance
from the late 1970s, they rather sardonically styled themselves the dangwai,
literally, ‘outside the party’, knowing full well that there was no need to
identify more specifically what ‘the party’ referred to.2
