From Administrative Trusteeship to De Facto Agency: The 1996 Shift in Sovereign Authorization and the Operational Transformation of the Republic of China's Legal Authority

After Taiwan completed its democratic transition in the 1990s, it developed a political system grounded in full democratic authorization, while continuing to operate the legal order of the Republic of China (ROC), which formally claims sovereignty over all of China. This coexistence has generated a tension between governance in practice and the nominal scope of legal authority. This article argues that this tension can be resolved by analytically distinguishing the exercise of democratic sovereignty from the application of historical legal authority. Taking the 1996 direct presidential election as a watershed, the period from 1945 to 1996 is conceptualized as one of administrative trusteeship, during which the ROC governed Taiwan on the basis of sovereign authorization derived from unre-elected national representatives claiming to represent China as a whole. After 1996, the article characterizes the system as one of de facto agency, in which Taiwan’s democratically elected government exercises sovereignty primarily under a Taiwan-centered democratic legal order, while conditionally continuing to operate the ROC legal framework in specific external and historically contingent domains, in consideration of geopolitical constraints and continuity in international relations. Through an analysis of civic naturalization, the article demonstrates that individuals who migrated to Taiwan after 1949 and their descendants have completed a legal transformation into members of Taiwan’s sovereign political community. The article further argues that de facto agency is not merely a strategic choice, but a structurally compelled equilibrium arising from the non-transferability of the ROC legal authority in the absence of a democratically representative recipient. On this basis, the article proposes a legal-theoretical framework that moves beyond the unification–independence dichotomy.