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This volume is the first attempt to systematically analyze issues and challenges confronting the Taiwan Strait after the March 2004 election. The volume focuses on internal politics on both sides of the Taiwan Strait and their impact on cross-Strait ties, and international responses. It also reflects different perspectives, namely, China, the United States, Singapore and Taiwan. Consolidating these perspectives, the volume suggests directions for continued research on a potentially volatile area where many view as the world's next “hot spot”.

The following sections are included: Introduction Pan-Green vs Pan-Blue: The 2004 Presidential Election in Retrospect Facts vs Fiction: ATale of Two Political Parties — The Pan-Green Taiwan's first national referendum The pan-blue After the Vote: Pan-Blue's Post-Election Disarray Merging the Pan-Blue: United \"We\" Stand? Looking Ahead: Prospects of 2008 Presidential Election

This is a study on the role of the KMT party-state in the post-war development of Taiwan. Specifically, it seeks to monitor the evolution of the state's role in socioeconomic management by examining the changes in the overall state-society relations. Two specific issues--the consumer protection movement and the breakthrough in trade opportunity with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe--are analyzed in detail. They are intended to illustrate how an increasingly assertive, self-confident private sector has demanded greater participation in policy-making and, thus, more control of their own destiny. Despite a more aggressive private sector and recent measures to relax the once authoritarian control of the government, prospects for multi-party, pluralist democracy in Taiwan remain distant. Primarily because of (1) the Confucian cultural traditions, (2) Taiwan's peculiar international status, and (3) Taiwan's delicate relations with the PRC government on the mainland, a political system characterized by open confrontation and multi-party competition seems highly uninviting. It is in this respect that Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Pluralism (BAP), not pluralist democracy, will likely characterize the new type of state-society relations. Following martial law, civil liberty in Taiwan has been expanded appreciably. In spite of the relaxation of control, there are specific boundaries, as manifested in the newly-enacted National Security Law, which no one should violate. Therefore, in this \"restricted\" type of pluralism, dissenting views are permitted but not conciliated; and \"deviated\" behaviors are tolerated but not placated. The government still retains extensive control of social groups' behaviors and activities, particularly on some politically \"sensitive\" matters; and it reserves the right to discipline, or outright disband, groups that violate stipulated rules and regulations. In all, martial law might have been lifted, but the age of socio-political control continues in Taiwan by merely assuming a different form--where the style of leadership has changed from exclusionary to inclusive, the method of governing from domination to coordination, and the pattern of management from coercive to manipulative.