Taiwan, after ending 50 years of Japanese colonial rule, became drawn into the KMT-CCP Chinese Civil War and US-Soviet geopolitical rivalry during the Cold War. Due to a wartime promise in Cairo and implementation of a global anti-communist containment policy, the United States handed over Taiwan’s sovereignty to the Republic of China when the ROC and Japan signed a Peace Treaty in the early 1950s. Under the Chiang Kai-shek regime, the ROC pushed for modernization and development with the goal of making Taiwan a base for Chiang to retake and return to mainland China. Living under the KMT’s martial law and wartime national mobilization, people in Taiwan lost their agency and own identity, and they were seriously deprived of their liberty and their rights were violated. The Vietnam War altered the power relationships between the US and two Chinas. The US and PRC formally normalized their diplomatic relations in 1979. This geopolitical shift brought opportunities to the Taiwanese people to pursue democracy and freedom in their motherland.

The dissertation discusses seven influential Taiwanese diasporic groups in diverse fields at the time—World United Formosans for Independence (WUFI), Taiwanese Associations (Taiwan tongxianghui), the Presbyterian church, Formosa Human Rights Association, Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), North America Taiwanese Professors’ Association (NATPA), and Taiwanese United Fund (TUF), with an emphasis on how their transnational activism and bottom-up diplomacy before and after the Meilidao Incident of 1979 had an impact on international attention on and support for Taiwan’s democracy and human rights. Based on oral histories and memoirs of Taiwanese diasporic community leaders and organizers, US Congressional and diplomatic documents, and Taiwan’s presidential and foreign affairs records, I will showcase multidimensional actors in the struggle for power: the potency and failings of Taiwanese diasporic activism, US human rights diplomacy and its setbacks on Taiwan issues, the KMT’s reactions to and restrictions of the rising Taiwanese diasporic power, and the PRC’s new Taiwan policy inspired by the changing power dynamics. I argue that after people in Taiwan lost their freedom and identity for two decades when the island became drawn into the Chinese Civil War as well as US Cold War containment, Taiwanese diasporic groups as forerunners as well as powerhouses spread democratic ideas and advocated from overseas. They became a driving force for Taiwan’s transition from a quasi-Leninist, one-party dictatorship to a multi-party democracy. The process of reworking this Taiwanese diaspora story and renegotiating its agency at the crucial moments of Taiwan’s democratization is thus, I contend, also the process of finding the Taiwanese people’s own place in the history of the Cold War.