Taiwan is still seen by many as an oriental military dictatorship, tainted by the imposition of a Kuomintang party-state which had lost the civil war in China to the Communists in 1949. And Taiwanese politics are often regarded as peripheral to the study of modern China. Yet exciting political developments have taken place since the mid-1980s; Taiwan has emerged from dictatorship to become, in the early 1990s, a state with an increasingly democratic orientation.

When, in the late 1950s, the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek settled down in Taiwan and accepted that it was unlikely to recover the Chinese mainland by force, it turned to "soft authoritarianism". But in 1986 Chiang Ching-kuo, then President, made the fateful decision to end the long-standing ban on an effective opposition.

Taiwan still has some way to go, but in the general election of December 1991 it passed the point of no return to become a democracy of a kind recognisable in the West, thus challenging earlier assumptions that liberal democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible.

It also raises the question whether the Kuomintang party-state's experience over four decades in accommodating socio-economic changes in Taiwan holds any lessons for the Communist party-state across the Straits. Taiwan's move to a prosperous, stable and increasingly democratic system under ethnic Chinese rule must present a challenge to the leadership on the Mainland and serve as a model for many people there.

These important issues highlight the need for closer study of Taiwan, which needless to say is an important subject of study in its own right. This volume has been written to meet this need, and at the same time to disperse out-of-date conceptions still prevailing. It is an international collaborative effort by the world's leading specialists on various aspects of Taiwan's political development, from Taiwan itself and several other countries.