ABSTRACT
Taiwan can lay claim to two modern “miracles,” both of which took most social scientists by surprise. The first miracle was economic. Almost no experts in the 1950s expected much beyond poverty from Taiwan’s economy. The island had been a backwater of mainland China through the 1800s, followed by fifty years of Japanese colonialism and major damage to its infrastructure during World War II. Things did not look much better when the Republic of China retook control after the war and moved entirely to the island after losing the civil war to the communists in 1949. The new leaders were known for corruption and massive inflation, hardly a recipe for building a modern economy from the ruins of poverty and war. Nevertheless, Taiwan was becoming an economic powerhouse by the 1970s and was a developed country by nearly any statistical measure by the end of the 1980s.
