The media and popular protest in pre-democratic Taiwan

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Volumn 20, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 565-580

  Rawnsley, Gary D ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0010724926     PISSN: 01439685     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/713669740     Document Type: Article

References (25)

1. This article contains material developed more completely in Gary Rawnsley and Ming-Yeh Rawnsley, Critical Security, Democratisation and the Media in Taiwan (London, 2001)
2. See G. D. Rawnsley, Taiwan's Informal Diplomacy and Propaganda (Basingstoke and New York, 2000)
3. The Government Information Office (GIO), a subdivision of the Executive Yuan and thus under the jurisdiction of Taiwan's Premier, is the government agency responsible for regulating Taiwan's media. However, under martial law the GIO worked hand in hand with the Taiwan Garrison Command (TGC), the chief institution entrusted with control over the media. This was a military agency that enjoyed a 'reputation for arbitrariness and ruthlessness'. [Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (New York, 1986), p. 63] The TGC was required to ensure the restrictive provisions of martial law were obeyed, and that included suppressing the media when necessary. Hence on the surface the GIO was technically the highest institution supervising all forms of domestic publications and electronic media, but the Garrison Command remained in de facto control until the end of martial law, at which time many TGC cadres simply transferred to the GIO
4. For further details, see Linda Chao and Ramon H. Myers, The First Chinese Democracy: political life in the Republic of China on Taiwan (Baltimore, 1998), p. 43
5. See Daniel K. Berman, Words Like Colored Glass: the role of the press in Taiwan's democratization process (Boulder, 1992)
6. Berman uses Samuel Huntington's functions of party organisation as his model, developed in 'Political Development and Political Decay', World Politics, 17(3) (1965)
7. Berman, Words Like Colored Glass, p. 194
8. Simon Long, Taiwan: China's last frontier (London, 1991), p. 54
9. C. L. Chiou, Democratizing Oriental Despotism (London, 1995), p. 74
10. Many useful accounts of 2-28 are available that explore the variety of explanations for the incident. The most useful is Lai Tse-han, Ramon H. Myers and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning: the Taiwan uprising of February 28, 1947 (Stanford, 1991)
11. Taipei Times, 7 March 2000
12. Taipei Times, 1 September 1999
13. Lai et al., A Tragic Beginning, p. 154
14. While mainlanders certainly dominated the KMT, it would be wrong to assume that the party did not also attract a large number of Taiwanese members. By April 1950, the party had recruited only 1000 new Taiwanese members. Two years later, Taiwanese accounted for over half the membership - some 56%. Chao and Myers, The First Chinese Democracy, p. 31
15. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle, p. 52
16. Chao and Myers, The First Chinese Democracy, p. 13
17. Shih Ming-teh in the Taipei Times, 9 December 1999
18. Huang Hua, Jianxingren di xinxin (The beliefs of a prisoner whose sentence was commuted), Taiwan Zhenglun, 3 October 1975, p. 39
19. Peter R. Moody, Tradition and Modernization in China and Japan (Belmont, 1995), p. 270
20. Chiou, Democratizing Oriental Despotism, p. 94
21. A full account of the 'Kaohsiung incident' can be found in Chou and Myers, The First Chinese Democracy, pp. 57-59
22. GIO, Taiwan's Media in the Democratic Era (Taipei, 1999), p. 4
23. Broadcasting and new media policies in Taiwan, in Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi, Dwayne Winseck, Jim McKenna and Oliver Boyd-Barrett (eds), Media in Global Context: A Reader (London, 1997), p. 82
24. Cable cat's cradle, Free China Review, 46(2) (1996), pp. 4-15
25. GIO, Taiwan's Media in the Democratic Era, p. 10