The termination of martial law in Taiwan on July 15, 1987 marked the end of a record: after thirty-eight years, the world's longest unbroken stretch of martial law was lifted on the island. Taiwan had been a Japanese colony for the first half of the twentieth century, and had come under the administration of the Republic of China's Nationalist (or Kuomintang, KMT, 國民黨) government in 1945, in accordance with an agreement made at the Cairo Conference of 1943. Soon after the Japanese surrender, fighting on the Chinese mainland began again, between Nationalist forces and those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In 1949, the collapsed Nationalist government retreated to Taiwan. There, the KMT, led by Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, presided until 1987 over a period of authoritarian rule known in Taiwan as the martial law era (jieyan shiqi, 戒嚴時期).

This chapter examines how Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT constructed the coercive institutions that implemented their four-decade rule, and why Chiang chose to organize these institutions as he did. In particular, it scrutinizes how and why Taiwan's coercive apparatus underwent profound organizational reforms in the early 1950s that shifted it from a fragmented and exclusive model of internal security to one that was unitary and inclusive. As Chapter 6 will show, these organizational reforms had profound consequences for state violence in Taiwan, but their origins have, thus far, remained unexplained. If some kind of path-dependent argument were at work, then Taiwan's coercive apparatus should have mirrored one of two inherited institutional legacies: either that of Japanese colonial policing, or that of the internal security apparatus used by Chiang and the KMT on the mainland. If external influence were at work, one would expect to see police and military structures preferred by, or modeled on, those of the United States. Neither of these factors, however, turns out to be determinate.

Instead, this chapter demonstrates that Taiwan's coercive apparatus during the martial law period, and in particular the changes to that apparatus that occurred in the early 1950s, emerged directly from the threat perceptions of Chiang Kai-shek. The first section of the chapter illustrates that prior to 1949, Chiang's primary concern was about how to govern Republican (mainland) China, where the dominant threat that he perceived came from disloyal elite rivals and regionally based warlords.