Much recent scholarly writing on the Taiwan "miracle" has shifted beyond th
e success of economic liberalization and toward a political transition that
has seen the seemingly spontaneous dismantling of an autocratic regime and
the heralding of democracy as an ideological mantle. Contrasts with the fa
ilure of perestroika and market reform elsewhere have led scholars to point
to the visionary role of leaders such as Chiang Ching-kuo and to instituti
onal peculiarities (not to mention neo-Confucianism) as seminal factors und
erlying this transition. The appearances are deceiving, however. Beginning
with the geopolitics of Taiwan's emerging neo-nationalism, I argue that the
dual policy of market liberalization and ethnic indigenization was part of
larger changes in the conception and practice of the state/party regime th
at had as its goal a new kind of hegemony that could coopt the interests of
a cultural China and a Taiwanese renaissance, that in turn undermined supp
ort for an increasingly conservative Old Guard and an increasingly extremis
t ethnic nativism.