ABSTRACT
As the decade of the 1990s passes its midpoint, Taiwan's position can be interpreted from two different perspectives. On the one hand, it appears to be moving ahead at a rapid rate. The missile tests arid war games that China conducted near Taiwan during 1995-96 demonstrate the continuing potency of the unresolved civil war between Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) which seemingly ended when the CCP drove the KMT from the mainland to Taiwan in 1949. The UN campaign, which President Lee announced in April 1993, might appear to be simply an extension of pragmatic diplomacy in the sense that the UN is just another international institution to which Taiwan has sought admission. During the 1970s and especially the 1980s, political liberalization and democratization were probably the most central issues in Taiwan's domestic politics. The cold war rivalry between the CCP and the KMT constitutes a potentially powerful ghost.
