Democratization and Social Classes: The Case of Taiwan

• Main Authors: Yi-hua Lin, 林奕華
• Other Authors: Hsi-mo Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/7ca4k6

碩士 === 國立中山大學 === 中山學術研究所 === 95 === A glance back the democratic movement of Taiwan in the mid-1980s, the transformation of class structure played an important role in the post-war period. The post-war transformation of the economic structure composes the essential premised changes of the class structure, but it is not enough to explain the democratization of Taiwan after the mid-1980s. Therefore, this thesis connects with the causalities among “economic structure”, “transformation of class structure” and “changes of political regime” to re-explain the fundamental origin of Taiwan’s democratization through the historical-structural approach. This thesis detects that the commercialized activities of agrarian production by the KMT government constituted the post-war economic production modes of Taiwan. And then the capital, extracted from the processes of agrarian commercialization, supported Taiwan’s industrialization. The industrialization becomes a crucial target for the historical process of Taiwan’s modernization. Through the industrialization, the traditional class structure of Taiwan was largely changed. It was at the cost of sacrificing the interests of the agriculture department to achieve the economic policy and produce enormous labor class. Following the promotion of the cultural and educational standards, it created a large number of technologic “Middle class” based on the intellectual capital. Part of the bourgeois extended their wealth from the early preferential measures of the socio-economic policies during the KMT government period. At the same time, the KMT government exploited the unreasonable take-over of lands and foodstuffs, and the adjustment of tax policy to accumulate the future cooperative basis of “official and merchant capital”. The interactions among the ruling class, bourgeois, farmer, labor class, and the Middle class fermented the social background of the changes of Taiwan’s political regime. At the last, resistant methods of social movements and deregulations of the authority from ruling elites within the KMT impelled Taiwan’s transition from autocracy to democracy.