2 - Comparative Terror in Regime Consolidation

Summary

Terror is always experienced subjectively, making it very difficult to assess its impact. Both the PRC in Sunan and the ROC in Taiwan engaged in strenuous actions to establish internal security and harden previously soft borders, and both deliberately used campaigns of fear to extend their reach deep into society. The PRC did so in Sunan with an openly named campaign: the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries while the ROC in Taiwan engaged in a series of vicious police actions against suspected Communists and subversives. While the confirmed numbers of victims are elusive, in either raw numbers or as a percentage of the population, the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries dispatched more victims in Sunan than the White Terror did in Taiwan. But in Taiwan, no social group was immune, and violent repression fell much more unpredictably than it did in Sunan.