Political Policies in China and Taiwan.
One does not need to search very thoroughly to find mountains of work on the rise of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the revolution of 1949 or "miracle- economic growth on Taiwan after the Kuomintang (KMT or "Nationalists-) took power following its retreat from the mainland.
What is difficult is finding literature that treats the two incidents of 1949 as two sides of the same coin. Because Taiwan quickly became a market-oriented, pro-capitalist American ally, while China adopted socialist policies at home and revolutionary ones abroad, the idea of comparing the development of the two seemed somewhat pointless. .
So, many studies of the two begin with 1949, as if the events preceding were the history of some third country. And yet, these decades paved the way for revolutions on both the mainland and on the island of Formosa. Indeed, there certainly was an island revolution. That revolution was primarily a socio-economic one. Later, democracy would bloom in Taiwan. Taiwan's successful economy and eventually successful democracy made it one of Asia's proudest success stories. Numerous works have tried to produce an explanation for Taiwan's growth, but few have done so with any comparison to its rulers' failed attempts at governance on the mainland. This has produced a significant academic void on the question of why the KMT was able to succeed on Taiwan, but not on the mainland. .
As such, there is little literature that looks at China or Taiwan through such a lens. So, in reviewing literature on the PRC and ROC, it is unfortunately necessary to discuss separately those documents analyzing the fall of the KMT in China and politico-economic "miracle growth- under the KMT in Taiwan.
Literature Review.
Background.
The most logical approach to this review would be to divide literature on the subject into to two major categories "those entries analyzing the failure of the KMT on the mainland and those analyzing the KMT's rule on Taiwan post-1949.
