Political Attitudes and Allegiances in the Totok Business Community, 1950-1954

Such a statement is typical of the way Western scholars have tended to depict the political struggle within the totok community at this time as primarily between "Communist" and "Kuomintang" partisans. This article is designed to show that rather than being dominated by the ideological struggle between Taiwan and the mainland, during the early 1950s the behavior of the totok Chinese business class in particular was primarily determined by their insecure domestic position as a pariah-entrepreneurial group in a potentially hostile, even dangerous environment.