The transnational protection regime and Taiwan's democratization.

Ooi, Su-Mei

On September 28, 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party was formed in defiance of restrictions set by a decades-old authoritarian regime, heralding the emergence of a fully competitive multiparty electoral system in Taiwan. Existing literature on Taiwan's democratic breakthrough suggests that international factors have played a significant role in bringing about democracy on the island. But what exactly were these external factors and how have they effected political change in Taiwan? A reexamination of the changing geopolitical and normative environments surrounding Taiwan suggests that they were crucial in shaping political development on the island in ways that have not been described in the literature. This article examines how the geopolitical and international normative environment enabled myriad external substate and nonstate actors to form a transnational "protection regime" around the political opposition, preserving the democratic movement and allowing it to reach its full mobilizational potential in time.

KEYWORDS: Taiwan, democratization, human rights, transnational networks, external pressure, political opposition

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For almost four decades, the Guomindang (GMD) government on Taiwan banned the organization of genuine political opposition and suspended national-level elections under the Temporary Provisions of 1948. (1) But when, on September 28, 1986, the political opposition took the highly symbolic act of ignoring the Temporary Provisions and declaring the formation of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), it forced upon the GMD a public acknowledgment of both the illegitimacy of its authoritarian rule and the legitimacy of the opposition's demand for democratic reform. In conceding to the opposition, a new phase in Taiwan's democratization was inevitably opened up, ultimately leading to a fully competitive multiparty electoral system in Taiwan.

The timing of Taiwan's democratic breakthrough presented a theoretical puzzle, however, because it was significantly delayed--the "socioeconomic prerequisites" of democracy posited by the modernization school had long been in place by the 1970s. Further, democratic breakthrough in Taiwan only occurred as the zeitgeist of democracy appeared to be sweeping through Asia as part of what S. P. Huntington (1991, 43) called the "third wave" of democracy. These facts suggested that the external environment was rather important to Taiwan's democratization. In the meantime, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent wave of democratization in Eastern Europe had begun to prompt a retreat from the received wisdom that international factors were necessarily of "secondary importance" to democratization (O'Donnell, Schmitter, and Whitehead 1986, 5). Reflecting this shift in theoretical direction, the literature on Taiwan's democratization increasingly acknowledged that the island's particular international circumstances could not be summarily dismissed as insignificant to its democratic development.

Unfortunately, no systematic study of the causal impact of international factors on Taiwan's democratic development was subsequently conducted. The third Taiwan Strait crisis gravitated scholarly attention toward the question of how Taiwan's democratization, having expanded political space for the independence movement, might influence world politics instead. A premature foreclosure of what would have been an interesting discussion of the international dimensions of Taiwan's democratization resulted. In reopening this question, I have adopted a conceptual approach that differs from the overall approach used by various scholars in their consideration of the international dimensions of Taiwan's democratization. Doing so has yielded new empirical findings that further what is at best a partial understanding of Taiwan's democratization process and corrects what is at worst a misunderstanding of some of its international dimensions. Doing so has wider theoretical implications, which I discuss at the conclusion of the article. I start with a brief overview of the literature on Taiwan's democratization to situate my approach.

The Problems with Current Understandings of the International Dimensions of Democratization in Taiwan

Explaining Taiwan's democratization processes through the international angle has had the advantage of shedding light on the timing of various moves taken by the ruling GMD to liberalize throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Several scholars have argued that the decisions to put in place the "Taiwanization" policy and to expand electoral competition took place during national crises triggered by the loss of Taiwan's seat in the United Nations in 1971, its subsequent marginalization in the Diaoyutai affair, and, finally, US derecognition in 1979 (Jacobs 1973; Tien 1989; Chu 1992; Chao and Myers 1998; Roy 2003). Further, the decision "to rely more on the legitimating function of electoral institutions" was an imperative that resulted from a reduction of military tensions with China in the late 1970s, which reduced the "siege mentality" of the Taiwanese (Chu 1992, 51). Yet another approach explains the GMD leadership's willingness to democratize as the result of international competition with the People's Republic of China (PRC) for the favor of the international community (Nathan and Ho 1993).

By the 1980s, the importance of international factors as further "constraints" on the GMD regime became increasingly salient (Wu 1995). It has been argued that a democratic breakthrough in 1986 was possible because the costs of repression began to rise for the GMD from 1979 onward. The manner in which it handled the Gaoxiong Incident and the strain this put on US-ROC relations during the Carter administration had brought international pressures to bear on the regime to liberalize (Chu 1992, 39). (2) In the context of international isolation and an increasing need to maintain a positive international image, it became impossible in 1986 to once again crush the opposition as it had done in 1979 (Wu 1995). Altogether, these approaches to understanding the nature and extent of international influences on Taiwan's democratization are centered on those external considerations that either constrained or motivated the GMD leadership.

To the extent that some breakthrough was made in acknowledging the importance of international factors in Taiwan's democratization, these were top-down approaches? To a significant degree, this was because the "crisis of authoritarianism" paradigm was predominant in the field of comparative politics at this time (Pye 1990). This theoretical emphasis coupled with Taiwan's unique international situation--where its national sovereignty was highly contested and still remains an open question--drove the emphasis toward the geopolitical factors that contributed to the delegitimation of the authoritarian GMD regime. The increasing reliance on the United States politically and militarily as its international situation worsened also led scholars to surmise that direct pressure on the GMD leadership to democratize was partly responsible. Further, the smoothness of the transition process and the ruling GMD's ability to stay in power throughout also led many scholars to conclude that democratization in Taiwan was a process admirably managed and crafted by a reformist-pragmatist faction within the GMD regime, rather than pushed from below.

There were exceptions to this predominant approach, of course. In an article emphasizing the role of the political opposition in Taiwan's democratization, the international setbacks of the 1970s were said to have stimulated a new wave of demand for democratic reform, initial patriotic reactions notwithstanding (Cheng 1989, 484). As a result of the GMD's foreign policy failures, young elites "questioned the political deficiencies of the regime" and thus began to pressure the GMD to liberalize (Cheng and Haggard 1992, 11). In a further study, which gives the most explicit treatment to the international dimensions of Taiwan's democratization, a bottom-up perspective was also incorporated.4 Here, Taiwan's increasing international isolation was said to have given political and social activists alike a window of opportunity for attacking a weakened GMD regime (Chu 1992, 34).

More emphasis needs to be given to the opposition's role in the democratization of Taiwan, however, because as T. J. Cheng and S. Haggard (1992, 17) pointed out, the "opposition was not without its own ability to influence the agenda and to force the pace of change." However, apart from obscuring the contributions of the political opposition to Taiwan's democratization, the top-down approach has also had the more serious problem of leading us to a partial understanding of the international dimensions of that process. This is because the international factors that are understood to have made democratic breakthrough possible are still narrowly confined to the geopolitical. In this unidimensional approach there has been a general failure to consider the impact of changes in the international normative environment.

Indeed, the reality was that neither external state actors nor Taiwan's changing geopolitical realities necessarily translated into direct pressures for democratic change. It must be remembered that the Gaoxiong Incident took place in the wake of US derecognition, and attempts to intimidate and muffle the opposition in the name of sociopolitical stability at a time of intense national vulnerability continued into the 1980s both at home and abroad. The emphasis placed on direct pressures that external state actors and geopolitical structural factors exerted on the GMD make for unsatisfactory explanations of the international dimensions of Taiwan's democratization. It was in fact a combination of related changes in both the geopolitical and normative environments--which led to the proliferation of transnational networks of nonstate and substate actors with the express purpose of providing the political opposition the protection it needed from the GMD--that better explains how the political opposition was able push the GMD's limited liberalization agenda to the point of democratic breakthrough in 1986.

Indeed, these complex networks of actors formed what I call a "protection regime" around the political opposition by providing external linkages between the political opposition and the outside world. These linkages enabled much-needed resources to be channeled from the international community to the opposition movement on the one hand, and information about the political situation in Taiwan to be channeled from the political opposition to the international community on the other. Importantly, the ability to generate, channel, and disseminate information abroad had the effect of raising the international visibility of political repression in Taiwan, exerting effective bottom-up pressures on the GMD to exercise restraint on political repression. In the context of an international normative environment where human rights had gained prominence as a legitimate international concern, coupled with the diplomatic vulnerabilities created by a changing geopolitical environment, the GMD regime could not afford the political costs of internationally visible political repression. Such protection was crucial to the survival of the opposition movement because of its vulnerability to the regime's continued monopoly on the state's coercive and propaganda apparatuses. This particular function of the protection regime was therefore very important, because it ultimately allowed the political opposition to defy the draconian provisions of martial law and form the DPP with impunity. Importantly, both types of external structural factors created the requisite external environment for the sort of bottom-up pressures generated by these complex networks of substate and nonstate actors, whose agency was crucial. Through a bottom-up perspective we are thus able to gain a more precise way of understanding how Taiwan's changing geopolitical realities and the international normative environment of the time eventually translated into constraints on the authoritarian practices of the GMD. A bottom-up perspective also enables us to see how the role played by external state actors in Taiwan's democratization has been oversimplified in the literature, consequently creating a misunderstanding of the exact nature of "external pressure."

The Protection Regime

What is known as the protection regime in this article is a partial derivative of the human rights regime that exists at the international level. Regime, in this sense, is defined generally as the "principles, norms, rules and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given issue-area" and should be distinguished from the usage applied to the GMD, as when it is referred to as an "authoritarian regime." (5) The international human rights regime is understood as consisting of international conventions, specific international organizations that monitor compliance, and other assorted regional human rights arrangements (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999, 234). Further, scholars of international relations have since traced the emergence of transnational networks of advocacy coalitions and international nongovernmental organizations from such a global human rights regime as important norm compliance mechanisms (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999; Burgerman 2001; Thomas 2001; Khagram, Riker, and Sikkink 2002). These findings have further led to the conceptualization of the human rights "international regime" as an "international political community" (Samhat 1999). Similarly, we have chosen to characterize what is a transnational community of actors related and motivated by "shared values or principled ideas," or "beliefs about what is right or wrong," as a transnational protection regime (Sikkink 1993, 440-441).

The reason for which the transnational networks described below have been termed a protection regime (as opposed to a human rights regime) is twofold. First, the principal focus of this research is not on the question of how international human rights norms are diffused or how they are internalized--as has been the concern of scholarship on human rights regimes--but on the question of how transnational advocacy networks have worked specifically to preserve the oppositional forces that spearheaded democratic breakthrough (Risse, Ropp, and Sikkink 1999).

Second, while actors motivated by the principled issue of human rights form a significant portion of these networks, many operating outside of this rubric have also been important. Indeed, although implicit in their motivations are those "values and principled ideas" of human rights, many of these actors are motivated by other principled causes. Take, for example, the Taiwanese diaspora, which for the purposes of this article has been confined to that in the United States. These crucial actors, who provided increasingly effective protection to the political opposition from the late 1970s to the early 1980s, operated under more than just the belief in the fundamental rights of the individual. More specifically, they were motivated to protect the political opposition in Taiwan because they believed that democratization would ultimately lead to the universal recognition of Taiwan's international sovereignty and the restoration of "ethnic justice." (6)

Moreover, there are other actors who fall outside existing categories in the international human rights regime literature. There is both a formal and an informal aspect to the protection regime because of the highly personalistic relations between actors that form the transnational networks. Indeed, one of the main characteristics of such networks as "forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal, and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange" is that it consists of "fluid and open relations among committed and knowledgeable actors" (Keck and Sikkink 1998, 8). The informality of such principled networks in the Taiwanese context have also come to mean that even random strangers, acquaintances, friends, and family who were not human rights activists belonging to an advocacy network came to be recruited on an ad hoc basis when the need arose. These individuals--now nameless and faceless in the annals of history--were nevertheless frequently involved and important to the survival of Taiwan's opposition movement. These actors, together with others described in more detail in the following sections, shared the same belief that the political opposition ought to be protected in order to further Taiwan's democratization and international sovereignty, so on the whole it is more accurate to describe these transnational networks as a protection regime.

Transnational Nonstate Actors--Who Were They, What Did They Do, and How Did They Do It?

The transnational networks that formed the protection regime should be described in more detail at this point. Broadly speaking, there were five types of nonstate actors that made up these networks, although many often belonged to two or more of these categories either simultaneously or at different points in time. These five types were (1) Christian churches and related ecumenical organizations; (2) human rights activists; (3) overseas Taiwanese; (4) foreign journalists; and (5) students and academics. (7) Except for the overseas Taiwanese, the majority of these nonstate actors were foreigners originating in the United States, Canada, Japan, and Europe, giving them a transnational nature. Further, these actors protected the political opposition in two ways. The first was by channeling both material and nonmaterial resources otherwise unavailable to the opposition, particularly at the most vulnerable moments of repression. These included the financial sustenance of dissidents deprived of a livelihood after running afoul of the regime or of their familial dependents during their incarceration. It may also have included the means of escape for both dissidents and their families. Further, the emotional support these networks have provided has been crucial for the opposition movement, particularly at moments of repression. The second and more important means of protection was by generating and channeling accurate information about political repression and the struggle for democracy and human rights in Taiwan to the outside world. By doing so, these transnational networks were able to influence international public opinion in favor of the political opposition and thereby create bottom-up pressures on the GMD regime. In this way, the regime was compelled to rein in its notorious security apparatus, and political repression was ultimately constrained.

The foreign citizenship of many of these actors explains how they came to provide effective protection for the political opposition--it gave them greater leeway to undertake the activities that they did. The GMD was leery of causing any diplomatic fallout should these foreigners claim to be harmed or harassed while in Taiwan or traveling to and from Taiwan, especially as its international situation worsened. Thus protected by their foreign nationality, these individuals could expect at the worst to be deported from Taiwan and placed on its blacklist, barring them from return. Realizing the advantages they had over the GMD authorities, many were willing to utilize their status as foreign nationals to assist and to shield the political opposition.

To understand how these actors came to form a protection regime for the opposition, it is also necessary to understand the nature of the networks they formed both within Taiwan and beyond. These five types of actors were often closely associated with one another and cooperated to the extent that their objectives overlapped. (8) Excepting foreign journalists, these actors would most consistently have spent time living in Taiwan. As a result, they would have established a network of close associates on the island, including opposition politicians, their families, and sympathizers. These networks were informal and personalistic, however, permitting occasional GMD infiltration. Nevertheless, such incidences of infiltration often had the effect of increasing trust between those already proven true to the cause, tightening the affective ties between a handful of these central actors, which would in turn consolidate as the central nervous system of the transnational network.

With time, two perceptible layers evolved within these overlapping networks. While the tightly knit core of the networks would be the center of information and directives, a peripheral layer of actors with limited knowledge of the overall purpose or content of their activities would often disseminate and carry out these directives. These peripheral actors were often selected spontaneously and occasionally involved willing students and other random members of society available at the time. Such an arrangement also provided a degree of insulation from infiltration at the core by the GMD authorities. Not all actors at the core or peripheral layers were necessarily transnational in nature, however. Core actors, by virtue of the fact that they are closest to the pulse of things, would mostly be located in Taiwan itself, although transborder movements and deportation meant that this was not always the case.

As the central nervous system of the protection regime, this informal core of the network was also very important in that it had the capacity to activate formal organizations and networks abroad, mobilizing their resources and creating channels of information otherwise unavailable. Three of the most important formal networks or organizations were Christian churches, human rights organizations, and overseas Taiwanese organizations. The most politically active church was the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), although the roles played by individuals from other denominations such as the Methodist, Quaker, and Catholic churches should not be overlooked. (9) The PCT was in turn closely linked to churches in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and to regional and global ecumenical organizations such as the Christian Conference of Asia and the World Council of Churches, respectively. Besides the financial resources that were raised to support the publication of opposition magazines at the early stages, these Christian organizations both mobilized material resources to support the families of incarcerated dissidents and provided less tangible and yet crucial psychological support they needed at the most vulnerable moments in the history of the democratic movement.

Further, these Christian organizations allowed for the generation of information about Taiwan's political situation. The homes of some of these foreign missionaries stationed in Taiwan would often serve as "communications hubs" linking foreign academics, journalists, and human rights activists who would gather to meet one another and learn of the local political situation. Christian organizations also allowed information generated at the core of the network to be channeled both within global Christian networks and beyond. Very important in the latter respect were their external links to members of the US legislature. Christian individuals, in conjunction with grassroots Taiwanese organizations in the United States, sometimes acted as go-betweens, introducing the Taiwanese political opposition to members of Congress. By inviting abroad certain members of the political opposition to give public lectures and to meet members of Congress, these Christian churches put a face on the opposition movement in Taiwan, reducing the indifference of the American public toward the plight of Taiwan's political dissidents at a time when Taiwan had been relegated to secondary importance in the calculation of US national interests. Further, such contacts reduced the negative image of the movement generated by the GMD's own network of agents, which pushed for an image of the opposition--especially its so-called radical elements--as forces for destabilization that would ultimately have disastrous implications for regional security. Indeed, the opposition's association with Christianity enhanced the morally reprehensible nature of political repression with the effect of raising international visibility and engaging sympathy. This was extremely important in what was ultimately a public relations war between the opposition and the well-oiled public relations machinery of the GMD overseas, where the opposition could not have matched the GMD in available financial resources. In times of need, these networks could therefore be more easily activated to protect the opposition movement.

Among the most notable human rights organizations that protected the political opposition was Amnesty International (AI), although other international and regional, secular and nonsecular human rights organizations have also played a part. Activists associated with AI also formed their own organizations by using their own resources--a significant example being the International Committee for Human Rights in Taiwan, which helped publicize political repression in Taiwan internationally. A handful of members forming the core of the transnational network described earlier were also human rights activists from or associated with AI. As a result of close relationships with the political opposition, their families, and their sympathizers, these activists had in their possession a wealth of accurate inside information on significant political events restricted by the GMD, as well as the channels with which to disseminate them. The professional and social status of some of these actors--respected academics, for example--lent credibility to such information and gave it value.

The value of such information is important because the political opposition needed a form of "currency" to engage those sections of the international media that were not necessarily committed to principled issues such as human rights or democracy, that had been co-opted by the regime, or whose anti-Communist politics favored the Nationalists. There were, of course, journalists sympathetic to the opposition movement in Taiwan on the basis of principled beliefs in human rights and democracy, but the control exerted by the Government Information Office on the mainstream Taiwanese media often made it difficult to discern the true facts of newsworthy political events. The fact that these eyewitness accounts presented a version of events very different from the official version gave them the value of sensationalism that promised greater readership for newspapers and magazines that published them. However, the accuracy of this information was also very important because it increased the probability that the mainstream media would pick up on them and run those stories without risk to their own credibility. The more widely this information was disseminated through the mainstream media, the greater was the international visibility of the GMD's human rights abuses. (10)

Overseas Taiwanese grassroots organizations, particularly those found in the United States--the Republic of China's patron and most important ally--were particularly important in understanding the protective functions of the transnational networks of nonstate actors. In the 1950s and 1960s, the overseas Taiwanese played a much more limited protective role, not least because tight controls restricted contact across borders. Apart from those who belonged to the Taiwanese Independence Movement, most Taiwanese emigrants during this time were also less engaged in anti-GMD activities, very likely because the majority were of mainlander origin. By the 1970s, this had changed as an increasing number of native Taiwanese went abroad for further studies or began to emigrate. Between 1977 and 1983, there was a surge in Taiwanese emigration to the United States (see Figure 1). The number of "native Taiwanese" organizations--independent of the GMD-sponsored "mainlander Taiwanese" organizations--increased dramatically all over the United States, concentrating in large urban centers (see Figure 2). Further, over a third of these emigrants were highly educated professionals and executives, with the capacity to grasp and navigate the ins and outs of the US political system and with the financial resources to become politically effective (see Figure 3). Figures 1-3 give a statistical indication of these trends.

This would prove important, because by the early 1980s the nature of overseas political activism began to change, turning away from the ineffectual radicalism of the World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI). In 1982, the Formosan Association for Political Affairs (FAPA) was set up specifically to undertake more effective lobbying activities in Washington DC--an anti-GMD equivalent of the "China lobby" that had previously existed. The GMD officials and agents in the United States would soon find themselves scrambling to keep up with what was an aggressive public relations war waged by FAPA, although it had less success in directly influencing the State Department and White House. (11) In this way, such overseas Taiwanese organizations were crucial not only in cultivating important relationships in the US legislature, but also in raising greater awareness of political repression in Taiwan in US political circles, the wider American public, and indeed the international community.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Foreign academics, students, and journalists also had a role to play in increasing the international visibility of political repression in Taiwan in different ways. Letters exposing the authoritarian aspects of Nationalist rule written by prominent academics such as John K. Fairbank and Ezra F. Vogel in internationally circulated, reputable newspapers such as the New York Times are a notable example of how the American public and the international community would be educated about political repression in the supposed "Free China." Expert testimonials during congressional hearings also served to educate the US political elite and the American public. Foreign students sometimes acted as agents conveying reports, name lists, photographic evidence, personal letters, and other important documents abroad--an important role considering the limited communications technologies of the day and the ease with which they could be monitored and controlled. Sympathetic foreign journalists, often at the junior level, along with academics, would also convey such documents and communications, thus acting as channels of information to the outside world. Further, there were a few occasions when these networks enabled certain dissidents to escape from the GMD authorities and from Taiwan itself, bringing them to safety and further publicizing the repressiveness of the regime. Sympathetic academics have further been known to provide fellowships at their institutions to political dissidents--making safe exile abroad, from which their political cause could be further pursued, a financially feasible alternative. Failing this, the emotional support that they provided to the activists and their families at moments of repression were invaluable in sustaining the morale of the dissidents. (12)

In sum, these transnational networks operated to create important linkages between the political opposition and the international community. These linkages helped create an increasingly effective protection regime by allowing, first of all, necessary external resources from reaching the political opposition. These linkages also allowed reliable and accurate information about Taiwan's political situation to reach the outside world, influence international opinion, and thus constrain the GMD in its actions toward the political opposition. Indeed, in helping generate accurate, credible, and valuable information about political repression in Taiwan and by providing channels through which such information could leave Taiwan and circulate internationally, these transnational actors raised the international visibility of the GMD regime's authoritarian practices. This was particularly important in the case of Taiwan, because while political repression was severe, it did not create immense sociopolitical upheaval. Taiwan had mostly been represented in the international media as a prosperous bastion of anti-Communism. The undemocratic aspects of an outwardly successful regime such as the GMD were thus easily obscured. As a former Taiwanese journalist emphasized, there was great difficulty in making the world take Taiwan's democratic cause seriously because, next to South Korea, which experienced constant sociopolitical crises in the late 1970s and 1980s, the general impression was that Taiwan was governed well. (13) Raising the international visibility of political repression thus became an important strategy in bringing international pressure to bear on a regime that could use national security as an excuse to stifle the opposition movement.

The Role of Substate Actors

To the extent that international actors have been considered important to Taiwan's democratic movement, the focus of the existing literature has been on state actors that appeared to have exerted significant external pressure on the GMD to democratize. The Carter administration's foreign policy focus on human rights has been largely credited with linking the GMD's treatment of the political opposition to USROC relations, which had become extremely crucial to Taiwan's diplomatic survival and continued military supremacy over the PRC at the time. In fact, arms sales to Taiwan increased during the Carter administration, indicating that the treatment of Taiwan's political opposition was never explicitly tied to national security issues, rhetoric notwithstanding (Lee 2000, 57). In a revealing admission, a former American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) official who was asked about the role the United States played in Taiwan's democratization said, "The Taiwanese did it themselves with almost no help from us." (14)

These views are by no means irreconcilable, but they force us to unpack the role of the United States as an influential state actor in Taiwan's democratization. (15) Indeed, despite the human rights concerns in the White House at the time, the priority of the State Department and the AIT officials on the ground was to ensure that the democratic movement would not destabilize Taiwan and give the PRC an opportunity to mount an offensive, undermining US national interests. As such, a more cautious approach toward what they saw as potentially subversive anti-GMD elements, including the more "radical" factions within the opposition, was taken. As a former Taiwanese journalist sympathetic to the opposition put it, "It wasn't always possible to know if you could trust the Americans. They had a 'two-hand' policy.... They tended to adopt a wait-and-see attitude." (16) Indeed, the sympathies of many officials lay with President Chiang Ching-kuo because he was believed to be a proreform leader who favored gradual, stable change--in line with US interests (Bush 2004, 198). Thus, the favored approach was to encourage stable negotiations between the moderate factions of the opposition and the reformist group within the ruling elite. (17)

Indeed, direct pressure exerted by US officials on the GMD has historically been inconsistent. In the 1950s and 1960s, opposition elements were given little, if any, support, not least because the Chiang Kai-shek regime was highly suspicious of the activities of the CIA and would often accuse the United States of instigating an overthrow of the Nationalist government (Peng 1972). By the 1970s, the political atmosphere in the United States itself had changed dramatically due to the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal, leading to a greater need to maintain the public appearance of a moral foreign policy. However, ensuring that prospects for democracy remained, while simultaneously preserving sociopolitical stability on Taiwan, was a difficult tightrope to tread. Thus, while US officials on the whole tended to look the other way when "low-visibility" political repression took place, they were compelled to intervene in certain instances of "high-visibility" political repression that could either threaten to spark instability in Taiwan or become a cause of public embarrassment for the US government. This tended to reinforce the impression that the United States was a key external actor in Taiwan's democratization, whereas the US leadership was a reluctant critic of the regime at best.

In reality, this complex situation mostly resulted in the gentle but rather less effective approach of "quiet diplomacy." During the Gaoxiong Incident, for example, President Chiang Ching-kuo was privately advised by AIT officials to refrain from harsh reprisals, for fear of damaging both the international image and interests of Taiwan and the United States (Bush 2004, 79). However, "private advice" alone was insufficient to raise the costs of political repression. When quiet diplomacy could not prevent the apprehension and trial of the opposition leaders for treason, the US State Department fought to contain the public relations fallout for both the Taiwanese and US governments. Although the State Department duly included the Gaoxiong Incident in its 1980 human rights report, the role played by gangsters employed by the security agencies in initiating the rioting was downplayed despite the fact that this was a point of consensus among US officials present in Taiwan at the time (Bush 2004, 80). That US officials did not desire to be publicly seen as supporters of repressive regimes was further underscored by the testimonials of State Department officials at congressional hearings on the Henry Liu murder in 1985, where the best efforts to downplay the harassment and intimidation meted out to critics of the GMD by its intelligence and security agencies were exerted. (18)

The protective role played by members of the US Congress was more consistent and significant, not least because the interests of congressional members were served in being receptive to the concerns of their anti-GMD Taiwanese constituencies. Indeed, although these substate actors were motivated in part by "principled beliefs," their individual interests were also served by taking up the cause of the political opposition in Taiwan as a human rights cause. (19) Institutional interests were also served by exposing the repressive aspects of the GMD regime. Important changes taking place in the relationship between Congress and the State Department at the time were giving the former more leeway in the oversight of foreign policy matters. This could be said to have given certain members of Congress--Pell, Solarz, Kennedy, and Leach--much more leverage in scrutinizing the GMD. At the same time, however, exposing the GMD's authoritarian antics gave Congress a reason to intervene increasingly in US foreign relations issues. The holding of congressional hearings and attempts to issue symbolic resolutions, press conferences held in the United States and abroad, and regular tours and reports by the committees of both houses in turn made the human rights abuses of the GMD highly visible to the American public and the international community, further compelling the State Department and White House to take issue with the GMD's authoritarian practices.

After US derecognition, the GMD leadership would have also become cautious in taking action that would either alienate or embarrass their congressional friends and their constituencies who had proved so vital in bringing about the Taiwan Relations Act, which had saved the regime from an outright legitimacy crisis. The efforts of US members of Congress (and the Taiwanese Americans who lobbied them) to highlight the Chen Wen-cheng and Henry Liu murder cases--discussed in more detail later--were therefore important in that they exposed the repressive activities of the GMD, some of which violated US sovereignty, embarrassing the GMD's supporters in Congress and eventually uniting them with GMD critics in their displeasure with the regime. Indeed, it proved to be the straw that broke the back of Taiwan's security apparatus, rolling back one of the most ardent enemies of the political opposition.

Nevertheless, the difficulties faced by pro-opposition members of the US Congress should not be obscured. The following example should suffice to illustrate the limitations experienced by substate actors supportive of the political opposition. In August 1986, shortly before the DPP was formed, the House Foreign Affairs Committee had approved with an overwhelming majority a resolution that stated among other things, "It is the sense of the Congress that the authorities on Taiwan should ... [allow] the formation of genuine opposition political parties." This would have been a very important signal to both the opposition and the GMD. However, as House Concurrent Resolution No. 233 was sent to the full House for vote, it failed to be passed because anti-Communist supporters of the Nationalist regime managed to block it. The Republic of China's international predicament could indeed work both ways--it made the GMD more vulnerable to international opinion but at the same time rallied together anti-Communist elements in Congress that supported the GMD because of the geopolitical implications of its dissolution. Although congressional members supportive of prodemocracy elements in Taiwan were often not very successful in passing high-profile resolutions or legislation that would have tied the GMD's human rights issues to arms sales, the publicity that hearings generated nevertheless raised the international visibility of political repression to the international community--bringing bottom-up external pressure directly to bear on the GMD regime and constraining US officials from giving unqualified support to the regime.

Owing to these complexities, it is therefore impossible to consider the United States a unitary state actor exerting unequivocal and consistent pressure on the GMD regime on grounds of human rights or democracy. Explicit public disapproval of political repression in Taiwan was often undertaken only as a result of pressures exerted on ambivalent US officials by the networks of nonstate and substate actors that worked consistently to raise the international visibility of repression in Taiwan in order to force them into sticking to their normative commitments to human rights and democracy.

Tracing the Development and Impact of the Protection Regime

Although it is seldom noted, limited efforts to give the political opposition some measure of protection from the GMD by providing external resources and raising the international visibility of political repression had begun as early as the 1960s. However, the geopolitical environment at the time was not conducive to the cause of either the political opposition or the few actors who tried to support them internationally at the time. One prominent case in the early 1960s will suffice to illustrate this.

In the late 1950s, a handful of leading mainlander liberals began to recruit local leaders in order to form an opposition party with a potentially broad social base. The GMD moved to crush this movement in 1960, arresting its main leader, Lei Zhen, and approximately a hundred of his supporters. At this time, the demise of the opposition movement received only limited news coverage abroad, partly because the mainstream Taiwanese media were tightly controlled but also because the international press was not warmly receptive of news that might tarnish the Chiang government. However, Lei's daughter and a small handful of supporters in the United States began a campaign to mobilize officials at the State Department, along with members of Congress, to pressure President Chiang Kai-shek to release the dissidents. Her efforts recruited the support of only one member each in the House and Senate, who proceeded to place pressure on State Department officials--unfortunately, without success. What has since become known as the Lei Zhen incident therefore died down with hardly a ripple internationally and domestically, and no sustained efforts to raise the international visibility of political repression in Taiwan materialized--with unfortunate consequences for the opposition movement, which languished for close to another decade.

The ousting of the ROC from the UN and its subsequent marginalization in negotiations over the Diaoyutai islands roused a brief wave of opposition centered on nationalistic students and intellectuals. By the early 1970s, however, the GMD regime was displaying the propensity to use co-optation as well as coercion in preventing the coalescence of organized political opposition, and this second wave of opposition was successfully contained by a limited series of concessionary liberalization measures. By the mid-1970s, however, opposition leaders were beginning to demonstrate that they could effectively mobilize popular support both within the officially sanctioned local electoral arena and on the streets. The potential for mass mobilization was realized in 1977 with the Chungli incident, where supporters of the political opposition burned down a police station in what was the first riot in thirty years. Hardliners within the GMD began to close in on the political opposition, resulting in the arrest of many key leaders, when a human rights day rally they organized in 1979--reportedly attended by as many as 20,000 persons--turned rambunctious in the city of Gaoxiong. At this time, many of the opposition leaders, including those holding office, were arrested irrespective of whether they were at the scene of the rally. They were held incommunicado and allegedly tortured to obtain "confessions." Many of the charges appeared fabricated in order to augment the severity of the sentences, including the death penalty for sedition under martial law. In two further rounds of arrests, supporters of the political opposition were also brought to trial, including a Taiwanese Presbyterian minister who tried to prevent the arrest of Shih Mingde, a key organizer of the rally. This signaled the GMD's intention of eradicating not only the opposition movement, but also local elements of the transnational protection regime, which the GMD well knew had been growing steadily since the mid-1970s.

Under pressure from key components of the protection regime--the international press and human rights activists--the trials taking place in military court were forced to go public. For the first time, close news coverage of the sedition charges, the evidence presented, and the sentences meted out to the opposition leaders allowed the Taiwanese and international community to scrutinize the GMD's actions in the court of law. As a result of closely following the trials, human rights activists were able to present the international community with alternative evidence to that presented in court against the opposition leaders. The International Committee for Human Rights in Taiwan and the Society for the Protection of East Asians' Human Rights published a complete transcript of the speeches made by opposition leaders at the Gaoxiong rally in 1981, testifying that they had not incited violence as alleged. In the meantime, human rights activists and yet another crucial component of the protection regime--the overseas Taiwanese--lobbied members of the US legislature tirelessly to pressure the GMD into reducing what were disproportionate charges against the dissidents. As one human rights activist described, the outrage felt by many overseas Taiwanese over the GMD's attempts to crush the democratic movement was a watershed moment in the mobilization of the overseas Taiwanese networks in support of the political opposition in Taiwan. (20) As the result of the international pressure placed on the GMD to hold public trials, and as a result of what was revealed about the GMD regime during those trials, these networks were further stimulated to keep up a sustained effort--absent in the 1960s and early 1970s--to raise the international visibility of political repression in Taiwan. FAPA was thus formed in the aftermath of the Gaoxiong Incident.

That the GMD was well aware of the constraints the activities of these transnational networks were beginning to impose on its actions is suggested by the fact that during the trials of the Gaoxiong dissidents, it sought repeatedly to discredit the opposition "by tying them to foreign interference in Taiwan's politics" (Copper 1981, 54). While local elements of the transnational networks such as Christian ministers were punished, a foreign academic supportive of the opposition was also falsely implicated in the murders of an opposition politician's mother and twin daughters in a possible effort to intimidate members of the protection regime. Nevertheless, their collective efforts to raise the international visibility of the GMD's repressive nature led to statements in the US State Department's annual Human Rights Report in 1981 that called into question the legitimacy of the evidence and subsequent military and civil court trials of the opposition leaders. The suggestion by an internationally respected source that the course of justice had been perverted for political motivations that reflected the position taken by members of these transnational networks was particularly damning in the postderecognition period, when certain quarters of the international press had begun to refer to Taiwan as a "pariah state." (21) The critical tone of the Human Rights Report and the changing tide of international opinion created external pressures that those dissidents believe resulted in the reduction of sentences--many of those charged with sedition received long prison sentences instead of the death penalty. Further, the regime was compelled to turn several cases to the civil court, and two other convictions were eventually overturned on appeal there.

As the furore over the Gaoxiong Incident was dying down, however, political scandals of international proportion developed. In 1981, a Taiwanese-born professor at Carnegie-Mellon University was brutally murdered while in Taiwan. Chen Wen-cheng, a US permanent resident, had been a vocal critic of the GMD regime connected to Shih Mingde. The murder was presented by the GMD at home and abroad as either a suicide or an accident, although forensic investigation had suggested otherwise. Members of the opposition and the transnational networks believed that Chen was murdered for political reasons by Taiwan's security apparatus in an effort to intimidate the political opposition at home and their Taiwanese supporters abroad. As questions continued to hang over Chen's untimely death, members of the protection regime exerted tremendous effort to lobby the US legislature to hold investigative hearings on the matter in order to reveal the political motivations behind Chen's assassination. Hearings in July and October 1981 by the Subcommittees on Asian and Pacific Affairs and on Human Rights and International Organizations later uncovered the frightening nature of security operations to eliminate political threats to the regime within Taiwan and in the United States. Indeed, during the hearings it was revealed that Chen had been under surveillance by the Taiwan Garrison Command on US soil before his death.

Chen's murder was followed by the assassination of dissident writer Henry Liu by two Taiwanese gangsters hired by the GMD in 1984. The explosive nature of the murder was precisely due to the fact that it took place in San Francisco, where Liu had lived. Members of the protection regime took care to raise the profile of the GMD's repressive tactics by encouraging Liu's initially fearful widow to speak out about the political motivations behind the murder. Congressional hearings were again held as a result of the lobbying efforts of overseas Taiwanese, Christian organizations, and human rights activists, during which time US support for repressive regimes like the GMD was brought into question. That the GMD regime's repressive tactics had violated US sovereignty also stirred up a hornet's nest over the question of the unwarranted leeway that agents of friendly states had been given to operate against residents and citizens of the United States. The Reagan administration--not pleased with such developments--was also very much constrained in its ability to contain the situation, because it had already begun to adopt a stronger human rights position in foreign policy by this time. Further, the scandals alienated what friends the regime had in Congress, shocked the American public, and consequently snowballed into a diplomatic fallout with Taiwan's most important ally at a time of increasing international isolation.

It was impossible to hush up these scandals, however, because of the efforts of the protection regime, which worked hard to capitalize on these incidents to raise the international visibility of the GMD regime's authoritarian nature. In fact, members of the transnational networks were integral to the publicizing of these events as symptoms of systemic political problems in Taiwan. Expert witnesses from the academic and Christian communities, along with the testimony of overseas Taiwanese, provided damning evidence of the GMD's illegitimate use of violence against the political opposition during those hearings. This evidence was accordingly conveyed to the international media through channels already described. As a result of what was exposed about the GMD, President Chiang Ching-kuo issued a directive to dismantle the Intelligence Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense and the Special Intelligence Bureau. These two organs of the security apparatus were subsequently merged and restricted to gathering military intelligence-a weighty measure to roll back the means of political repression quite unlike the limited liberalization measures of the past. Further housecleaning included the removal of Wang Sheng, a somewhat shady character in charge of the informal Liu Shao-kang Office, which had become the power center within the GMD as the president slipped into bad health. (22) As a result of raising the international visibility of political repression by the protection regime, the hardliners within the GMD regime were constrained by the mid-1980s, paving the way for the political opposition to defy martial law by forming an official opposition party without regard to the Temporary Provisions.

Explaining the Growing Strength and Effectiveness of the Protection Regime

Early efforts to raise the international profile of political repression in Taiwan failed to achieve their intended effect of restraining the GMD largely because the Cold War environment was particularly unsuited to the close scrutinization of the Western world's anti-Communist allies. By the early 1970s, however, as Sino-US relations warmed and Taiwan was no longer central to US security policy in the region, closer scrutinization of political repression in Taiwan became increasingly permissible. Importantly, by the late 1970s and 1980s, the struggle to retain the de jure sovereignty of the ROC had come to make the GMD particularly sensitive to the opinions of the international community, heightening the effectiveness of efforts to expose authoritarian practices in Taiwan. As the People's Republic of China gained in international standing, this struggle intensified. As such, the GMD regime had little leeway in its attempts to either weaken these transnational networks or ignore their activities aimed at tarnishing the regime's image as the government of "Free China." In other words, both the overarching geopolitical environment and the immediate geostrategic concerns of the regime favored the efforts of these transnational networks.

What gave the protection regime a justifiable cause was, of course, the rise of human rights as a legitimate international concern--a change in the international normative environment led by the easing of East-West tensions in the early 1970s. Further, such a change in the international normative environment allowed the transnational networks, which were thin on the ground in the 1960s, to proliferate to such a level of density in the late 1970s and 1980s that it became impossible to effectively police or truncate them. Indeed, the necessity of maintaining a democratic image also made it more difficult for the GMD to restrict the movement of Christian missionaries and foreign journalists, for example, because of the nominal commitment to respect the freedom of religion and information. The overall cohesiveness of these nonstate actors, the increasing availability of financial or material resources, the ability to mobilize them with ease, and the autonomy it was able to establish from the arm of authoritarianism abroad further added to the strength of these networks.

Of course, those very changes in the international normative environment that led to the proliferation and rising legitimacy of such transnational networks from the mid-1970s onward have yet to be discussed. Very briefly, they stem from the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, which committed countries of both East and West to human rights principles inherent in the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Helsinki Act allowed the respect for human rights to move from a mere articulation of lofty aspirations impeded by the principle of nonintervention to become a legitimate concern in the conduct of state-to-state relations. And as certain Western democratic states such as those in Scandinavia increasingly promoted them as part of their foreign policies, changes in the international normative environment gave increasing traction to those nonstate actors interested in the promotion of human rights.

Further, the Helsinki negotiation process itself induced profound changes in the international normative environment particularly relevant to this research in two ways. First, what has been called the Helsinki Effect explains the proliferation of transnational advocacy networks that have provided the protection regime in Taiwan a basic template for pursuing their aims (Thomas 2001). Indeed, the Helsinki negotiation processes had by late 1976 transformed the landscape of transnational human rights activism in encouraging the emergence of social and political movements centered on transnational human rights advocacy groups activated by the Helsinki negotiations. As tangible results began to show in Europe, such transnational networks were duplicated elsewhere, leading to a spillover effect on a global scale. Their successes also attracted other principled actors to join forces. The establishment of human rights as a legitimate international norm thus favored the proliferation of such agency, explaining how those with intersecting beliefs came to form similar and increasingly dense collections of networks by the late 1970s and early 1980s over their concern for the democratic movement in Taiwan.

Second, human rights issues became increasingly bound to the identity of democratic states because of the interaction between Western democratic states wanting to incorporate human rights into the Helsinki Act and those Communist states that resisted it. Indeed, because the Western democratic countries chose to interpret and represent human fights as civil and political rights while the Communist bloc chose to emphasize social, cultural, and economic rights, this discourse bound the Western concept of human rights to the ideals of democracy. Altogether, this obligated states that were allied with the West and who nominally identified themselves as democracies to demonstrate more explicitly an actual adherence to international human rights standards, while Western democracies themselves became increasingly constrained in their support of regimes that violated these norms. Under such normative constraints, the efforts of transnational actors concerned with human rights and democracy in Taiwan to raise the international visibility of political repression became increasingly effective in raising the cost of repression for the GMD regime.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated the workings of what Cheng and Haggard (1992, 18) have called an "overseas arena" to show exactly how transnational grassroots mobilization operated to protect a nascent opposition movement and enable it to boldly challenge martial law and achieve democratic breakthrough in 1986. This explanation is revisionist to the extent that external pressure is no longer understood as exclusively top-down in nature, an interpretation led by the extant literature on democracy promotion. This is consistent with Whitehead's interpretation of the limits of what he calls "control," exerted by the Western democracies that appear to have been most interested in democracy promotion (Whitehead 2001). Indeed, the case of Taiwan illustrates the complexities of implementing a human rights agenda in US foreign policy, and thus, the inconsistencies and limits of direct "control" by Taiwan's principal ally and patron. External pressure is better understood in this case as generated by transnational networks of non-state and sub-state actors from the bottom-up. Their growing strength and effectiveness from the mid-1970s onward corresponded unmistakably, on the other hand, with changes in the geopolitical and international normative environments--both of which instated human rights as a legitimate international concern and democracy as an increasingly important requisite of membership in the Western camp. A combination of external structural preconditions and transnational agency thus allowed for alterations in the domestic balance of power between opposition forces and authoritarian incumbents, creating an aperture for democratic breakthrough in 1986 that might not have otherwise been possible.

While democratization is a complex process and it is impossible to weigh the relative importance of other factors of democratization in a tight fashion, what has hopefully been made clear is the more limited claim that the transnational networks of nonstate and substate actors can provide important protection for local oppositional forces by significantly constraining the repressive behavior of authoritarian regimes. Additional comparative research is needed, however, to further understand why this protection regime might have operated in some cases and not in others, and thereby to determine the generalizability of the causal explanations presented here. Indeed, while the permissiveness of an overarching international normative environment is a constant, the "protective function" of these networks in other contexts does not always prove to be equally robust. The preliminary findings of a comparative study I have conducted, using two other cases where there is such variation, suggest that serious consideration needs to be given to the differences in the immediate geopolitical circumstance of each case. Geostrategic factors may in fact vary the strength and effectiveness of similar protection regimes by altering the capacity of authoritarian regimes to weaken these networks or to ignore their activities on the one hand, and changing the extent to which the international community's attention will be engaged on the other. (23)

While it is suggested here that this model could possibly offer interesting and worthwhile avenues to examine both successful and failed attempts at democratic breakthrough, it may also provide a means to consider the possibilities for democratic breakthrough in future cases. Indeed, if such a protection regime operated in the case of South Korea, particularly in the period leading up to the Seoul Olympics of 1988, this insight could help shed light on the recent Beijing Olympics and their potential impact on democratization in China. Further comparative research on cases where relative international disinterest could have left the transnational allies of domestic oppositional actors weakened and ineffective is also worth pursuing in order to shed light on whether this explains the failure to achieve democratic breakthrough in some countries--one such recent case of interest being that of Myanmar.

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Notes

I would like to thank the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, and the Dr. David Chu Scholarship for generously supporting this research. Special thanks also go to Joseph Wong, Steven Bernstein, Shelley Rigger, Edward Friedman, Tun-jen Cheng, and Fu-chang Wang for their insights, assistance in acquiring materials, and encouragement. I am also much indebted to Stephan Haggard and two anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments.

(1.) Two nominal opposition parties, the China Youth Party and the Democratic Socialist Party, existed. Under the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion," national-level elections were suspended, and all candidates had to belong to the GMD or these two parties, or campaign as independents.

(2.) The GMD cracked down on the political opposition by arresting its key leaders at a human rights day rally they organized in Gaoxiong in December 1979. Prior to this, popular support for the political opposition had surged and the arrests were widely seen as an attempt to clamp down on the political opposition. Under pressure from the international media, the subsequent trials of the opposition politician-activists were made public, exposing the GMD to international disapproval.

(3.) For an exception, see Cheng (1989).

(4.) See Chu (1992, ch. 6). The emphasis in this chapter is on the effect of democratization on Taiwan's foreign policy.

(5.) According to Krasner (1983, 1), regime in the latter sense is a "system of government or administration."

(6.) The opposition movement in the United States and elsewhere had a far more explicitly proindependence agenda than did the movement in Taiwan.

(7.) These components of the protection regime share some similarities with those transnational advocacy networks described by Keck and Sikkink. See Keck and Sikkink (1998, 9).

(8.) Not all actors had the explicit objective of effecting political change in Taiwan, but all were concerned about human rights abuses.

(9.) The Presbyterian Church in Taiwan had a very strong "native" identity, explaining in large part their strongly anti-GMD orientation.

(10.) These activists would also run their own independent publications. However, because financial resources were limited, these publications were fewer in number and circulation was much smaller.

(11.) A former Taiwanese diplomat based in the United States. Interview by author, Taipei, April 20, 2005. This was somewhat true for GMD agents as well after 1979, since derecognition barred any official representation of Taiwanese interests in the White House, the State Department, and the Department of Defense.

(12.) Former activists interviewed have confirmed the importance of this psychological support.

(13.) Interview by author, Taipei, April 1, 2005.

(14.) Interview by author, Taipei, March 5, 2005.

(15.) Most interviewees gave little credit to the Japanese government, although Japanese human rights activists played an ostensibly important role.

(16.) Interview by author, Taipei, April 1, 2005.

(17.) A former congressional aide; interview by author, Toronto, February 10, 2006.

(18.) Deputy assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs testified on February 7, 1985, that there was no proof of a consistent pattern of harassment or intimidation against overseas Taiwanese in the United States.

(19.) The overseas Taiwanese groups were also engaged in fundraising activities for these congressional representatives.

(20.) Interview with Gerrit van der Wees. DVD recording, Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, Oral History Project, Taipei, 2003.

(21.) See, for example, Ching (1979).

(22.) Wang, a "hardliner," had been slated to succeed President Chiang.

(23.) For a detailed discussion of these case studies, see Ooi (forthcoming 2009).

Su-Mei Ooi is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. She has research experience in both the public and private sector as research associate at the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (Berlin) and as analyst/editor at Business Monitor International (London). Her interests span the subfields of international relations and comparative politics, including international political economy and comparative democratization, with a regional specialization in Pacific Asia. Figure 2 Distribution of Settled Taiwanese Emigrants by US City, 1975-1990 Los Angeles, CA 92,068 San Francisco, CA 57,806 Chicago, IL 18,013 Baltimore, MD 11,223 New York, NY 47,055 Boston, MA 9,587 Houston, TX 12,547 Atlanta, GA 9,467 Washington, DC 7,049 Newark, NJ 20,641 Source: Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission, ROC (Taiwan). Note: Table made from pie chart. Figure 3 Taiwanese Emigrants to the United States by Occupation, 1983-1990 Professional specialty, and technical 21% Students or children under age 16 42% Service 6% Farming, forestry, and fishing 1% Operator, fabricator, and laborer 2% Precision production, craft, and repair 1% Administrative support 7% Sales 5% Executive, administrative, and managerial 15% Source: Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission, ROC (Taiwan). Note: Table made from pie chart.