ABSTRACT
The Taiwan Independence Movement (TIM), the vanguard of Taiwanese nationalism, originated in the mid-1940s, when the Kuomintang (KMT) took over Taiwan at the end of World War II. However, due to severe state repression, the TIM had to formulate its organizational infrastructure in political circles away from the island. From the late 1940s, activists began to organize clandestine political organizations in Hong Kong and Japan to question the legitimacy of the KMT's rule over Taiwan. Starting in the mid-1950s, the idea of Taiwanese nationalism gradually found some resonance among Taiwanese students who were studying in North America. It can be said that of all the phenomena that characterized the history of Taiwan in the 1990s, the emergence of Taiwanese nationalism has had the most dramatic impact on its political landscape (Shu 1998).
