Introduction: Taiwan as a Frontier Political Space

This chapter discusses how students at college-preparatory high schools in Taiwan have engaged with the island's political transformation from an authoritarian regime to democracy. Any discussion of political activity by Taiwan students must take into account the larger historical framework of Taiwan society in the past 50 years, and Taiwan's place in the larger spatial and temporal orbit of modern China's history (Shepherd, 1993).

Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist partisans (KMT) gained control of Taiwan, a Japanese colony since 1895, at the end of World War II. Civil war broke out on the mainland between the KMT and Mao Zedong's Communists soon after the Japanese surrender, and refugees from the mainland began pouring onto Taiwan. In April 1948, the newly elected National Assembly on the mainland approved temporary amendments to the ROC Constitution, which resulted in the imposition of martial law in Taiwan.