Land Reform and Political Change in Rural Taiwan

• In Event: Down with the Crown

Abstract

Classic theories in the social sciences have suggested that the landed elites have historically acted as the largest barrier towards democratization. Yet many authoritarian regimes during the height of the Cold War – across different ends of the ideological spectrum – have sought to pre-emptively wrestle power away from large landowners via land redistribution and the replacement of traditional political institutions at the grassroots level. Can an authoritarian regime forestall democratic impulses by extending redistributive rewards to the wider rural population and by co-opting preexisting local political networks? In this paper, I examine the case of Kuomintang (KMT) regime on Taiwan (1949-2000) and the electoral legacies of its 1953 land reform via an original compilation of historical agricultural and electoral data. I find that while the sociological changes within the agricultural communities in the long term did contribute to higher rates of sustained support for the authoritarian regime, the co-optation of Japanese colonial era local elites via grassroots agricultural institutions had a negative effect in preventing further party defection come electoral competition. I argue that the Taiwanese case of rural reform under the KMT era serves as an important comparative case study for evaluating the enduring political legacies of rural reform under authoritarian rule, in particular strong state-building regimes that emerged out of Cold War era competitive pressures.

Author

• Kevin Wei Luo, University of Toronto