Reform without Zijiren?

Excerpts from an article by Shen Ze-wei (沈泽玮), reporter with Singapore’s Morning News (联合早报).
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Update, 20200921: an extremely non-permanent link.

Next try: a Google group.

In 1949, the defeated government of the Republic of China retreated [Update, 20101230^*)] to Taiwan. Two million mainlanders crossed the sea and joined the six million local people. This big retreat is considered the greatest migration movement across the Taiwan Strait in modern history.

Maybe these people didn’t know that their home town would have to become a mere place of birth (他乡就要变故乡). And maybe they didn’t know that this new land where they settled down would write history with two miracles: an economic take-off, and the political democratization of a Chinese society.

(…) Wasn’t Chiang Kai-shek victorious after all? (…)

National Chengchi University State Development Research Institute’s professor Lee Yeau-tarn (李酉潭) told this paper [Morning News] that Chiang Kai-shek was able to implement land reform in Taiwan, but not in the mainland, because the KMT had been intricately connected with the despotic gentry (豪绅, haoshen). “When the reforms reach your own connections (自己人, zijiren), you simply can’t reform. In Taiwan, the KMT wasn’t hampered in that way. (…)

First the economy, then politics, this sequence of reforms started to push on.

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^*) Morning News frequently (re-)moves pages after a while. The newly-linked article contains Shen’s original article.

Tags: academic, accountability, business, Chiang Kai-shek, China, Communist Party of China, corruption, countryside, democracy, development, economy, government, ideology, image, industrial relations, KMT, lobbyism, Taiwan