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This chapter details how, with the People's Republic of China winning Mainland China and the diplomatic recognition of Indonesia, the positions of the Nationalists and Communists reversed. Having switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, Jakarta nevertheless allowed the Chinese Nationalist Party apparatus to continue its activities until 1958. Jakarta's ambiguous attitude induced a battle for influence between the two rival Chinese governments. As a regime in exile, the Chinese Nationalist government adjusted its past policies to fit the new circumstances resulting from its retreat to Taiwan. Having lost formal diplomatic representation, the Nationalists forged clandestine alliances with the Indonesian right-wing forces through the personal networks of the remaining Chinese Nationalist loyalists. In contrast with Taipei, Beijing prioritized state-to-state diplomacy over its connections to the overseas Chinese. By suspending the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among the overseas Chinese and signing the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty, Beijing attempted to ease Jakarta's concern that the ethnic Chinese could be used as a Communist fifth column.

This chapter focuses on the Sunflower Occupy Movement which broke out in March of 2014, shaking Taiwan's political landscape and its relations with China. The Sunflower Movement was a culmination of resistance to China's political influence and to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government's democratic careening. It arose from a changing political atmosphere and a wave of interconnected social protests in preceding years. Ultimately, it was a rare transformative event in which powerful collective action ruptures the structures confining a country. “Structures” here refers to two kinds of structure that constrain the space of individual and collective action but also induce action within this space: the structure of political rules, and that of ideology. This popular upsurge brought about tremendous impact, not merely transforming the political landscape of Taiwan but also diverting the political direction of the country from the KMT's pro-China policy, thus interrupting the course of a decade-long Chinese Communist Party (CCP)–KMT cooperation.

This chapter examines Taiwan's impressive record of rural development. In Taiwan, the defeated Kuomintang regime (KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party) sought to regain control of mainland China by transforming the island into a model province that would legitimize its right to rule. The KMT carried out a comprehensive land reform program in the early 1950s, which led to the creation of a smallholder farm economy with extremely low levels of inequality. In addition to land reform, the KMT built up a rural extension system to provide technical education and production inputs to farmers. These institutions resulted in nearly two decades of accelerated growth. According to Taiwan's former president Lee Teng-hui, agriculture played a textbook role in Taiwan's development. It met the domestic demand for food, accounted for a substantial share of exports, and provided capital and labor for industrialization. As one of the first countries in the post-World War II period to achieve industrialized nation status, Taiwan stands out as an exemplary case of successful development. The chapter then sheds light on what happened after the government's urban-biased policies were reversed in the 1970s.