During its rocky 20th century, Taiwan spent 50 years as a Japanese colony following the Sino-Japanese War before being abruptly returned to Chinese rule at the end of World War II under Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) government. While Chiang’s forces battled Mao Zedong’s Communists on the Mainland, Taiwan’s public and private sectors crumbled from neglect and the rampant corruption of the island’s KMT executive, a situation that was only exacerbated by the arrival of progressive waves of refugees from the Mainland as the Communists gradually overwhelmed the KMT. When Chiang himself was driven to Taipei in 1949, and soon thereafter declared Taipei the capital of the exiled Republic of China government, he doubled down on the brutal repression of suspected communists that had begun with the notorious massacre of February 28, 1947, by declaring martial law, which was only lifted in 1987.
It’s one of the miracles of film history that, during these four decades of “White Terror,” a great national cinema emerged. Aided by government support via the state-owned Central Motion Picture Corporation and demand from the growing market in Hong Kong, Taiwan by the mid-’60s was the third most prolific national cinema in Asia, behind only India and Japan—though this position of dominance would be short-lived, as Hong Kong soon thereafter greatly expanded its
