ABSTRACT
In short, the agrarian tradition produced the imperial order of monarchic centralization and the principle of subordination and submissiveness. All these factors came to define what was traditional Chinese culture. Submission to authority in traditional Chinese culture was intimately connected with this subordination principle. However, in postwar Taiwan, industry started to pervade the society and changed everything. During the socioeconomic restructuring in postwar Taiwan, the most noteworthy development has been the rapid growth of the private sector of industrial production, which had been lagging behind the public sector. In a historical perspective, the prosperity of postwar Taiwan is a spectacle in its own right. However, industrialization and education have changed the overall cultural milieu of postwar Taiwan: from subordination to coordination, from submission to an unquestioned authority to enlightened equality among various power units, from paternalistic centralization to capitalistic open society.
