ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explores how Taiwan’s economic dependence on the US interacted with the Taiwanese state’s market economy interventionism to restrict the development of Taiwan’s press freedom almost throughout the Cold War (1949–1988). Specifically, due to its military and economic dependence on the US, Taiwan’s state elites occasionally implemented lenient media policies to further the US government’s objective of building a “free China” in Taiwan and to secure various material supports from America. However, due to the Taiwanese government’s market economy interventionism, state elites had strong capacity to maintain authoritarian control over the media, protecting their political legitimacy from being weakened by external factors. Therefore, media institutions during this period were characterized by state ownership, strict regulations, government censorship, state-oriented censorship, and state-sponsored oligopolies. Furthermore, under US hegemonic influence, state elites introduced a distortion of the American social responsibility theory of the press, applied in Taiwan to legitimatize authoritarian media institutions.
