Zontar, your position "not exactly an angel" is basically in other words, that he wasn't great, but he wasn't so bad. If you read about the history of Taiwan, you will see that, actually, he was really bad. That's why I suggested you take a look at those links or do your own research on Taiwanese history.

Let me give you an example. When Chiang and the KMT came to Taiwan, they systematically tried to eradicate all things that weren't "Chinese". This includes Aboriginal culture, Minnan culture (a Chinese culture), Hakka culture (a Chinese culture), culture left behind by Japanese colonialism. The destroyed tons of architecture that they thought wasn't Chinese looking and replaced it with Northern Chinese imitations (funny thing was--a lot of what they destoryed was Southern Chinese architecture!). They tried to eradicate Taiwanese when it is a Chinese language that preserves a lot of vocabulary from the Tang Dynasty and when Mandarin is some kind of weird mix of northern Chinese and Manchurian.

Slave-labor camp is the wrong terminology to be using. If you really know Chinese history, you know that actually they believed in what they were doing at the time. It's like the Nazi's in Germany. The ideology just swept up an entire country that was starving and pissed off and it was how they thought they could make things better.

Mao's China vs Chiang's China is a false dichotomy. The mistake was allowing so much power to be concentrated in the hands of a single person, and I'm no libertarian, but hell, ideology wasn't the problem--it was hero-worship and being all swept up by this idea that government could and should go and change all the fundamental things of people's lives. The mistake was thinking that government should be controlling things like culture and language.

It happened in Mao's China and it happened in Chiang's China and in Chiang's Taiwan. If it weren't for a few key economic reforms (especially by his son, who despite his economic record was overall also an asshole), free "China" wouldn't have been much better off than Communist China.