Insufficient Google-fu for: Kuomintang ("Nationalist") Chinese govt-in-exile

Factual Questions
1

In 1948, amidst a civil war for control of China between the Nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government and the Communist “Revolutionary” forces, the KMT convened a National Assembly and formed a government body. Shortly afterwards this entire government fled to Taiwan, where they maintained a claim on the mainland, and incidentally were unable to hold new elections in their original mainland provinces, so that the legislators elected in 1948 were “in power” (sort of) more or less indefinitely.

This summary information (further summarized by me) is about all I can find out about the KMT “government” that was hastily and sketchily formed, which then went about running the island of Taiwan for the next 45 years or so.

I’d like to get some more details on the actual composition of this government, including names of officials and what areas/provinces they were meant to represent. I suppose a lot of this information would be in Chinese, which is OK, though if it is in English that would be preferable.

Also, as these “thousand year legislators” aged, some kind of process was put into place in the 1980s to replace them or phase them out. A list of such legislators and their terms of office would be interesting to me as well.

Can anybody help point me to this information anywhere online?

2

Some numbers from Wiki. Looks like the Legislative Yuan moved to Taiwan en masse, and didn’t allow new members until 1969.

3

Perhaps you might find some useful information at the Kuomintang party website. Interestingly, their party history ends in 1935.

4

There are still some KMT outposts in far northern Thailand. You go to their little villages, and it’s like you’re in China. No Thai writing anywhere, it’s all Chinese. The people look Chinese rather than hill tribe or Thai. I think you can pick up a souvenir of tea whose packaging reads something like “Souvenir of the KMT” or something like that. These are remnants of the KMT who fled across the Chinese border into Burma in 1949 instead of to Taiwan. This group was involved in the CIA drug-dealings detailed in The Politics of Opium in Southeast Asia. The ones in Thailand were granted asylum way back when. The government has tried to get them to assimilate, but they remain islands unto themselves, scratching out as much of a living as they can. I think they’ve given up on the idea of overthrowing the Chinese government, though.

The KMT in Burma and Thailand have a fascinating history really. Lots of CIA spy stuff thrown in, too. Great reading. Check out the aforementioned book.

5

In a nutshell: The first National Assembly, elected on the mainland in 1947 to carry out the duties of choosing the president and amending the constitution, was re-established on Taiwan when the KMT moved. Because it was impossible to hold subsequent elections to represent constituencies on the mainland, representatives elected in 1947-48 held these seats “indefinitely.” In June l990, however, the Council of Grand Justices mandated the retirement, effective December 1991, of all remaining “indefinitely” elected members of the National Assembly and other bodies.

I remember in the 1980’s these geriatric legislatures. There were many that literally were wheeled in on hospital beds for votes, nurse and doctors at their side, with IV drips. This was also the time of the first DPP legislatures, including the “Rambo of Parliment” and his name was IIRC Ju Gao-zheng (this can’t be right - bastardized pinyin and Taiwanese romanization). Rambo

Search on

  1. +KMT +“legislature for life”
  2. kmt mainland elected legislature

The second one above will give 50k hits. That should be a good start.

6

Dang missed the edit window.

Rambo of parliment because he used to start fistfights as a filibuster. The elderly KMT guys had quite a problem competing with such a “young turk.” This was also the time of stripper Hsu Shao-tan, who ran an unsuccessful campaign. Her slogan was “my tits are like nuclear weapons for peace” and I remember her being featured on the Saturday Night Live news. Ahhh, the budding days of a democracy.

7

Thanks to all for the interest and help so far!

Yes, but who where they and what were their home provinces/areas? (I have more than an intellectual interest in this.)

I did get this far before, but the most detail I can find so far is the number of such legislators… I would think that since this “Parliament in suspended animation” sat in power and ran Taiwan from 1948 through the 1980s, there would be some actual listing of who they were and what their official duties and districts were supposed to be. I can find out the names and districts/states of the people making up the US Senate and Congress for any given year; if this Parliament was more or less completely static for 40 years, surely a catalog like this should be of historical interest?

8

What has to be remembered is that to most of the American people, and I believe the Brits and French as well, the KMT was “the majority party in a democratic Republic of China which had been the freely chosen government of China before Communist subversion overthrew it on the mainland.” For fairly complex reasons, it benefitted almost all the American leadership to subscribe to this theory over the reality of a pre-war China split four ways between KMT, CCP, the Japanese, and local warlords, with a quasi-truce and loose alliance of the other three power blocs against the Japanese during WWII.

Again describing a 1950s perspective on what happened, “In 1946-49 the Red Chinese underground [which actually held political control over more land area than did the KMT] by subversion and deception overthrew the legitimate government, that headed by Chiang Kai-chek, and dominated the peaceful Chinese people in a typical oligarchic Communist dictatorship, which differed from Hitler’s, Mussolini’s, and Stalin’s only in minor details. The legitimate government, protected by the US Sixth Fleet, retreated to Formosa (the old Portuguese and at that time almost universal name for Taiwan) and a few offshore islands. But with our help they will someday free China of its Coimmunist oppressors and reestablish the free Republic of China which fought alongside us during WWII.”

I presume I don’t need to point out the errors of fact and interpretation in the material in quotation marks above. The reason I’m posting it is that for people young enough not to remember the Fifties and early Sixties vividly, the idea that it was Us and Our Allies the KMT Against the Godless Evil Commies sounds like satire instead of what was near-universal belief at the time.

This also has an immense amount to do with why the two islands Quemoy and Matsu were so important. Other than the Pescadores Is., which fell to the Communist mainland government shortly after the Taiwan refuge was set up, they were the two remaining elements of China that had not fallen. And, being right off the coast, they were part of Kwangtung Province, not of Taiwan Province. That elevated them to a symbolic status all out of proportion to their area and population. So long as the Taipei government held Quemoy and Matsu, it was the legitimate government in control of parts of two provinces of China – not just the government of Taiwan. In the same sense that a child not yet toilet trained can embody the national aspirations of a monarchy just by being alive, Quemoy and Matsu by remaining a part of Nationalist China said to the world that Chiang was just suffering a setback in his crusade to restore republican democratic government to all of China. Or so we believed.

9

In that case, please allow me.

Whom are you quoting here? Whoever it is, I believe they have a bombastically simple-minded interpretation of the times. The US was never committed to returning Chiang to the mainland, and indeed at first didn’t care whether the Communists took over Taiwan either. (cite ). That changed somewhat in the Korean War, but even then the US would only go so far to protect Taiwan with the, ahem, Seventh fleet and allow Chiang to reinforce Quemoy and Matsu.

No they didn’t: Penghu, aka The Pescadores, still a part of the Republic of China on Taiwan .

They’re part of Fujian Province.

10

My guess is, not really. It was a rubber stamp legislature, with Chiang Kai-shek and later his son Chiang Ching-kuo firmly in control. I doubt whether you would find any online English language sources for this, and probably not many Chinese sources online either. Bit of a footnote to a footnote to history, you know.

11

Let me take a stab at this, ít’s been a while. You’ll probably have to do real library type research instead of on-line since all of this pre-dates the internets significantly. Frankly, most China stuff needs to be researched the old fashioned way. There were plenty of articles in the English language China Times in the 1980’s. What you’re looking for certainly is available in Taiwan, but probably not on line. There probably are records in English too.

Ok, so here’s the deal as I remember it. Chiang Kai-shek had once again reconstituted his government in Nanjing (Nanking) after the Japanese surrender and during the full scale civil war in the aftermath. CKS got considerable support during the war from the US (both by threatening to make a seperate peace with Japan, and with the very serious lobbying powers of “Missimo” aka Soong Mei-ling aka Mrs. CKS with newspaper publisher Henry Luce, President Roosevelt and a speach to congress, etc), and then the post war anti-communism. CKS was the horse that the US bet on in the civil war.

That said, CKS or at least his wife and brother in law TV Soong understood US politics. Therefore, there was a need to have a “duly elected representative government” to keep the US support. CKS and TV Soong then hand picked “duly elected representatives” from every province of China and created an “elected national legislature” of rich, powerful cronies. Lest anyone think I’m being partisan, I learned 99% of this first hand in Taiwan in the 1980’s.

I’m also pretty sure that these “duly elected representatives” were officially from the provinces they represented. Not necessarily born there, but ilisted n the official family historic register. I have no idea if each province had x # of legislatures, an equal number of legislatures, based on population, based on a district or what

This rubber stamp parliment duly rubber stamped for 1+ years and then fled to Taiwan when the Mainland was lost. After fleeing to Taiwan, this parliment kept alive the fiction it was a) democratically elected and b) represented China. By the way, Taiwan had it’s own provincial legislature as well, which made things interesting in the 1990’s.

OK, so now there is a “duly elected parliment” in exile representing all the provinces of China (and then some including Outer Mongolia). There was no way to hold elections in China since it was then 100% controlled by the Communists, and if parliment was disbanded then there goes a cornerstone in the fiction of legitimacy to govern all of China. The simple solution was to just extend everyone’s terms. Pretty easy to do since CKS was a military dictator with undisputed control.

Now, you’ve got a legislature with indefinately extended terms and natural attrition. I seem to remember something about there was a decision to not replace the attrition with sons or relatives. There were also some new people ëlected." I seem to remember that these new people had to be officially born in the province they were “representing.”

When I went to UC Davis in the early 1980’s, a couple of my acquaintences “Uncles” or “Grandfathers” were among these legislatures. Quotes only because an uncle or grandfather in Chinese culture can extend to a good friend of a distant relative and not necessarily a blood relation. These guys were constantly travelling back to Taiwan to vote a few times a year in certain sessions when a quorum was needed.

When I lived in Taiwan first in 1982 and then in the late 1980’s, these guys were dying off like flies. You’d see the votes on TV and in the newspaper and as I wrote earlier literally some were on their death bed.

Does that give you more background?

12

Your Turn, not saying the quote is wrong but that’s not the history I learned. At most, there may have been a short interlude where the US affected to not care. Taiwan was called the unsinkable aircraft carrier. US troops were stationed though the 1970’s on Taiwan. The CIA ran very active spying programs through at least the 1970’s on China based from Taiwan. The latest incident was 1996 when IIRC it was again the 7th fleet that steamed around Taiwan (not through the Taiwan straits) during the missle launching crisis then. The US has been most certainly actively supporting Taiwan, the status quo or at least preventing the disruption to global trade that would accompany outright hostilities.

13

But isn’t that a far cry from committing to return KMT rule to the mainland, as Polycarp seems to assert was our policy? Certainly not in 1996, when we had already recognized Beijing and didn’t even acknowledge the ROC as having a legitimate government.

14

ahhh, it was certainly the hope and/or pipedream that CKS would someday re-unite all of China under a pro US and anti-commie ‘democratically elected’ government that really wanted to purchase US goods. I am not aware that anyone with real power ever publicly committed to anything more than support, and never to activeky or jointly returning CKS to the mainland.

how long and to what extent that persisted is open to debate. when did the military realize this wasn’t going to happen. Certain members os US congress, usually big anti-commies like jessie helms continued big taiwan support through at least the 80’s.

think it’s fair to say unleasing CKS hordes on China fiction was buried with Kissinger’s Shanghai Communique in 1972 (?).

15

gah, damn hamsters and weird display on my pda

16

No, that changed totally during the Korean War, as your own cite demonstrates. Two days after the Korean War broke out, the United States sent its navy to the Stratis of Formosa and made it clear that from that point forward an attack on Taiwan by the PRC would be an act of war.

No, the United States would have gone to war if necessary, which is as far as you can go. We had a mututal defense treaty with the Republic of China in force from 1955 until 1979. This was reinforced by the 1955 Formosa resolution, which passed Congress with only six dissenting votes.

17

I was responding to the assertion that the US was committed to helping to “free China of its Coimmunist oppressors and reestablish the free Republic of China which fought alongside us during WWII.”

In this light, “as far as you can go” would include actively assisting the ROC in trying to overthrow the mainland regime, which has never been US policy either before or after the Korean War.