Phillips, Steven E

Abstract
Over the past twenty years, the intelligence and security services of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan have been transformed. After decades as “political police” answerable only to the ruling Nationalist (Kuomintang, KMT) Party, in the 1980s they began morphing into institutions that would focus solely on actual threats to the state, end the use of coercion, and accept external supervision.1 Intelligence and security reform in the ROC, however, proved far more complex than a reorganization of the state spurred by democratization over the past two decades. Like all aspects of political change on Taiwan, the reform of the ROC’s intelligence and security agencies has been intimately bound up with the island’s unresolved dilemmas of national identity and its precarious relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
In the late 1940s, the Nationalists faced defeat in their war against Mao Zedong’s Communist forces and the remnants of the KMT regime retreated to Taiwan. While ruling the island from the city of Taipei, the KMT kept national unification as its official goal and held fast to the claim that it was the legitimate government of all China and would one day restore the island to a unified China under Nationalist auspices. Many of those who had been living on Taiwan were far from unquestioning. From the time of the Nationalist takeover in 1945, ending fifty years of Japanese colonial rule, a rift had been growing between “mainlanders” and the native-born Taiwanese, whose families had emigrated from the mainland prior to 1945.2 Mainlanders, through the Nationalist Party and government, held all the powerful political posts. While never as brutal as Mao’s Communists were as they built the PRC on the mainland, the KMT saddled Taiwan with a martial-law regime that lasted from 1948 to 1987, and sometimes harshly repressed Taiwanese who dared to act on their political aspirations. The successful and relatively peaceful process of democratization has allowed political parties to engage in heated debates over the island’s national identity, even as Beijing maintains that Taiwan is a renegade province and works actively to isolate the ROC from the rest of the world. Today, Beijing and many mainlanders on Taiwan continue to insist on the “One China” policy, which posits that Taiwan is but a province of China awaiting unification. Many Taiwanese, however, have a very different view.
This fraught history, along with Taiwan’s still ambiguous international status, has lent an intensely emotional cast to questions of group identity and political belonging. Whether one supports unifying with the mainland, maintaining the current status of the ROC on Taiwan, or becoming an internationally recognized sovereignty, that stance is entangled with the question of whether one identifies oneself as Taiwanese, Chinese, or both. Partisan divisions formed along such cleavages have become endemic within the government and have acted both as spurs and hindrances to intelligence reform. The Nationalists controlled the intelligence, security, and military services during the martial-law years, but the political landscape began to change in the 1980s with the advance of “Taiwanization,” a process in which native-born cadres gradually replaced mainlanders in each of these services. Many problems in the intelligence and security establishment remain, and must be handled within a sharply divided and tumultuous political environment.
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