ABSTRACT
During the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan enjoyed relative stability in its domestic and international politics. Under the strong hand of Chiang Kaishek, domestic opposition was all but invisible, while the dynamics of local elections turned many Taiwanese into active KMT supporters. Meanwhile, the Cold War encouraged strong international support for the ROC as a defense against communist expansion in East Asia. Thus, in these decades, the ROC leadership was able to ignore or suppress pressure for democratizing reforms.
