ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the process of retrocession and the Kuomintang' (KMT) installation of a hard authoritarian regime over the island. It looks at the major Leninist-inspired institutions established by the KMT to enforce the regime, bolstered by Martial Law, then how it also ignited rapid economic development and attendant social change from 1945 until the eve of the democratic transition. Institutions are human constructions neither erected nor dismantled overnight, and, decades since the termination of Martial Law, Taiwan's state and society continue to wrestle with the authoritarian legacy as they struggle to create and refine the institutions for consolidated democracy. Taiwan's politics and political system attracted very little scholarly attention in the four decades from the end of World War II until the democratic transformation of the late 1980s. Taiwan's postwar politics must start with the KMT, literally the National People's Party.
