ABSTRACT
The Taiwan "economic miracle" found its way into the heart of Western scholarship not simply because of the rapid increase in the number of objects manufactured; there was always a second and social point to be made. History under the Nationalist state (Kuomintang [KMT]) had become "growth with equity"—increased production and greater social equality. Social equality, however, was reduced to relatively equitable Gini coefficients of income distribution, usually expressed as comparisons of relative income shares going to the top and bottom fifths of a distribution. Like many modern miracles, growth with equity constitutes a mythology in the sense developed by Barthes (1972) (Johnson 1990). 1
