ABSTRACT
Taiwan's now familiar emergence as a newly industrializing country (NIC) and as a major international trading nation seemed exceedingly unlikely back in the 1950s. Defeated and humiliated on the mainland in the late 1940s, the "temporary" capital was moved to Taipei in December 1949. The government for the next decade or so operated an ostensibly "high-politics" foreign policy that was almost totally out of touch with reality. It was obsessed with "retaking the mainland," a policy goal that was met worldwide with a combination of scorn at best and mocking amusement at worst. The world was watching the "New China" on the mainland, and most nations were adjusting to that fact. Taiwan's high-politics posture was also totally unrelated to its meager resources, which were clearly no match for the newly emerging People's Republic of China (PRC).
