Modernisation and clean government: Tackling crime, corruption and organised crime in modern Taiwan

Taiwan's formal title is the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan because it is the continuation of the government of mainland China that fled to Taiwan in 1949 and has survived there ever since. The rulting party in the ROC is the Kuomintang (KMT, the Nationalist Party of China). The ROC government on the mainland was plagued with problems of corruption at almost all levels, while the regime on Taiwan successfully reinvented itself and oversaw a remarkable economic transformation of that island. This article considered the ROC's corruption problems on the mainland and attempts to explain why these problem shave proved to be so intractable. Corruption played a major part in undermining the Kuomintang's rule on the Chinese mainland. Once the ROC moved its seat of government to Taiwan in 1949, it was forced to take a very different approach to crime and corruption. The next section deals with the evolution of the KMT on Taiwan while the final part of the discussion looks at the problem of organised crime on the island. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.