Taiwan entered the international spotlight in 1996. No longer seen as just an economic powerhouse and diplomatic dilemma, the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROCOT) caught international attention in two new dimensions: politics and security. In March the ROCOT's first ever direct presidential election took place against the backdrop of unprecedented military coercion from the People's Republic of China (PRC). The world watched nervously as Taiwan's presidential candidates campaigned while Chinese missiles landed near the island's two major ports and air and naval forces of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) held live-fire exercises in the Taiwan Strait.

Taiwan's society today has been shaped primarily by four streams of influence: the traditional China stream, the Japanese stream, the Republic of China stream, and the cosmopolitan stream. The traditional China stream gave the people of Taiwan their language and their basic culture and customs. After 1895 the Japanese stream flowed into Taiwan for 50 years, causing many significant modifications to its society and cutting the people of Taiwan off from the critical changes that occurred in Chinese mainland society during that period. In 1945 the Republic of China (ROC) took over Taiwan, bringing from the mainland its ideology, its educational system; its constitutional structure, its political and social institutions, and a governing elite, most of whom spoke a different dialect of Chinese from the people of Taiwan. The purpose of this article is to identify the principal elements of this ROC stream of influence. The cosmopolitan stream, representing primarily the influence of the West, flowed into all the other streams, to some extent influencing traditional China before the fall of the Qing dynasty, but much more powerfully influencing the ROC on the mainland and Japan. Since 1945 the cosmopolitan stream, at first largely American, has also poured into Taiwan, gaining momentum and diversity with each passing year.

In 1994 one commentator described Taiwan's people as having “been nurtured and cultivated to acquire the characteristics of an ocean. Their former conservative character, like that of traditional China's, has been remoulded into another only concerned with goals and caring nothing about principles.”1 Another commentator has depicted the island's “break toward an independent existence of its own – neither Chinese, Japanese, or American but thriving on the synergism generated by all three – [is] partly due to its location, its strong economy, its strong defences, and its status as a world trader.”2 Unlike the Chinese people of mainland China, then, Taiwan's people have closely interacted with other peoples and civilizations.

For old Taiwan-hands, the island's traffic serves as the best metaphor for society there: it lurches between extremes of Hobbesian chaos and paralysis. Drivers either rush frenetically with little regard for others or get stuck in traffic jams of epic proportions, all the time emitting dangerous pollutants into the air everyone must breathe. A superhighway may have six carefully demarcated lanes, but at any time there seems to be a minimum of ten discernible streams of traffic, as vehicles weave in and out, honking, bullying, dodging and frequently colliding. A frontier ethos still rules in this parvenu society, where 25 years ago motorcycles began to replace bicycles, and now privately-owned cars including all the priciest prestige models from around the world, are ubiquitous, riding and parking wherever their drivers feel able to stake out a claim. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is on the move, or trying to move, unwilling to yield to others, treating strangers with shocking incivility.

Taiwan is a geographic location, an economic force, a political presence, a social reality and a cultural expression. The “precious island” (baodao), in the minds of those who are vaguely familiar with East Asia in the English-speaking community, evokes sensations of stunning natural beauty, hard-working people and troubled international status. Those who have travelled there as tourists in recent years are easily impressed by the vibrant economy, cuisine, traffic jams, air pollution, rich folk traditions and colourful popular culture. While journalists and business executives may be fascinated by the transformative power of marketization and democratization in Taiwan's political economy, many students have been overwhelmed by the profound impact of economy and polity on all dimensions of the cultural world - literature, art, dance, music and drama - since the lifting of martial law in 1987.

This article examines the process of democratization from the December 1992 Legislative Yuan election, a watershed event in the course of Taiwan's regime transition, to the March 1996 presidential election, which put a conclusive end to the process of democratic transition. The political significance of the 1992 election as a historic conjuncture is multi-faceted. First, it was a necessary first step for a full transition to democracy, that is, a founding election.

Taiwan's economic performance from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s is regarded as that of an archetypal Asian Newly Industrializing Economy (ANIE). It achieved rapid growth, marked structural change and an exceptional export performance. During the 1980s, however, important changes in the pattern of growth and associated policy challenges became evident. These changes partly reflected the internal evolution of the economy as it began to exhaust both its labour intensive comparative advantage and also, arguably, some of the benefits of the regulated and protective institutional structure that underlay early economic successes.

There is now general agreement among observers of international economic and technology affairs that the world has entered a period characterized by the interplay of two potent and possibly dialectical forces - globalization and regionalization. Globalization, which is clearly manifested in the changing nature of competition in industries ranging from textiles to telecommunications, is being driven by a combination of diverse forces, including the communication and transportation revolutions, the growing trends towards liberalization, privatization and deregulation, and the rapid diffusion of technologies around the world. Multinational companies (MNCs) have become the principal purveyors of globalization as they seek out new markets and search the world for access to critical R D, production and distribution assets irrespective of where they may be found. Regionalization, on the other hand, has primarily been driven by macro-political forces, with governments as the initiating agents, as in die case of the formation of the European Union and the North American Free Trade Association. Where regionalization is driven by explicit and overt government actions and policies it can more often than not be seen as an anathema to globalization; politicallyinduced regionalization in these cases is driven, in large part, by concerns about loss of national competitiveness and a decline in economic welfare.

The story of the post-1950 Taiwan economic miracle has been told many times. Quite a few authors have also dealt with aspects of the environmental degradation which has accompanied this growth. In general the literature places the blame on Taiwan society as a whole. It is critical of the government's slow evolution of regard for environmental protection, industry's lack of effort to assume its responsibilities and a lack of individual citizen concern prior to the 1980s. It is true that Taiwan's economy has grown rapidly since the 1960s. Unfortunately, this growth was linked to a low environmental consciousness and the lack of political will to regulate land use and pollution abatement. It was rooted in plastics, petrochemicals, leather goods, pesticides and other high polluting industries. These industries were attracted to Taiwan in part because of the environmental consciousness growing in the island's major markets, the United States and Japan. Sectors of the government favoured heavy industry as it would help with any efforts for a counter-attack against the Communists on the mainland. Social awareness of environmental issues and discontent with government and corporate management only began to grow in the 1980s and the government has yet to come to grips fully with the problem of environmental degradation. The purpose of this article is to describe the current state of Taiwan's environment, to trace the development of environmental movements on the island and to assess government's capability to salvage the situation.

Since 1949, the spectre of the People's Republic of China (PRC) has constantly dominated Taiwan's political stage. The PRC was considered until the mid-1960s by Chiang Kai-shek, then President of the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROCOT), as a part of the country to be reconquered from the Communist bandits (gongfei). And since the United States′ de-recognition in 1979 the reunification with mainland China has remained one of the key official objectives of the Nationalist regime.

The international relations scholar Arnold Wolfers once noted that national security was an “ambiguous symbol.” While the Republic of China on Taiwan's (hereafter ROCOT or Taiwan) international status has certainly been ambiguous in recent years, its security has been crystal clear. Taiwan has lived under the threat of military attack or other coercive measures from the People's Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. The mainland Chinese authorities have repeatedly refused to renounce the use of force against Taiwan, claiming it a potentially necessary tool to reunify what it considers to be a renegade province with the “motherland.” As long as Taiwan lives under the threat of military force and coercion from the PRC, this will have a defining impact on the island's domestic life and international profile.

In the 1990s Taiwan began to pose a complex new challenge to the international community. At issue is Taiwan's attempt to revise the so-called “one China” policy as it had been previously understood. By seeking to be treated as a separate state that was distinct from mainland China, Taiwan was embarking on a new approach that confronted the Beijing government with what it saw as the totally unacceptable prospect of secession by a renegade province that would in effect subvert China's unity and national coherence.

Since losing the mainland to Communist conquest in 1949 (more accurately, since the North Korean invasion of the South in June 1950), Taiwan has become a continuous foreign policy protectorate of the United States. Had it not been for American security protection, Taiwan would long since have come under Beijing's rule. Several causative agents, separately, in combination or sequentially, kept Taiwan out of mainland Chinese hands. These included, initially, the American Seventh Fleet, then generalized American military might in concert with the American-Taiwan Defence Treaty of 1954, thence the three American- Chinese communiques forming the basis of post-1971 relations between the two countries, concomitantly the American Congress's Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 and the accompanying (and subsequent) legislative history, and, throughout, China's inability to overcome, with a high probability of success, active Taiwan military resistance and probable American military support. While the economic and, more recently, political transformation of Taiwan materially strengthened that entity such that its defensibility against attack rose greatly, to say nothing of its overall attractiveness, from the onset of the People's Republic of China it was the American connection that was the sine qua non of Taiwan's quasi-independent existence.