A generation ago, Taiwanese residents leafing through the latest copy of Time or Newsweek would regularly come across pages where articles or photographs had been blacked out, or even entire pages ripped clean from the magazines.
Such censorship was the work of the Government Information Office (GIO), and the offending subjects were almost always Chinese communism - the bete noire of the Kuomintang at the time - or advocacy of Taiwanese independence. Although its powers were trimmed to a mere information office in 1999, the GIO, together with the Taiwan Garrison Command, was known as the 'dark hand' that controlled free speech and stamped out political dissent in Taiwan for 50 years.
On Sunday, the GIO will close and its functions will be merged into other government departments in a wider bureaucratic restructuring as the island's president, Ma Ying-jeou, begins his second four-year term.
'The office has witnessed the development of Taiwan from [an] authoritarian state where free speech was restricted to full-blown democracy where anyone can criticise politicians, even the president,' said Professor George Tsai Wei, a political analyst and professor at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei.
The GIO was established in May 1947 in Nanjing when the mainland was under the control of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. At first, the GIO was tasked with overseeing domestic and international publicity, guiding the media industry and providing news analysis.
At the end of the civil war in 1949, the GIO followed the defeated Chiang government to Taiwan, where martial law had been enacted the year before, and it briefly acted as a publicity office for the cabinet. In January 1954, it resumed its original role and was given additional powers to oversee publicity through radio and film and act as a liaison office. Part of its annual budget also went to subsidising media organisations .