Taiwanese Tariffs, 20th Dec., 2010.

Robert Wade wrote an article for the Comparative Politics Journal, titled "Managing Trade: Taiwan and South Korea as Challenges to Economics and Political Science."

The average rate actually paid on all imports was only 11 percent in the mid 1970s. About half of leviable tariffs were rebated, deferred, or exempted at that time because they were on imports to produce exports or imports of machinery and equipment to make certain specified products. The average ad valorem rate on the remainder was about 20 percent from 1969 to 1977. [ . . . ]

The big increase in the share of permissible to controlled import items is generally taken to mean a big liberalization of trade: from 41 percent in 1960 and 1970, controlled items fell to 2 percent in 1974 and continued at about this level thereafter. [ . . . ]

In the mid 1980s about a quarter of Taiwan's imports by value were covered by origin or agency restrictions.'6 A given item might be "freely imported," but not from specified  places or only by specified agents. The origin restrictions have been used to exclude the most competitive sources of competing products, and in particular to reduce the large bilateral trade deficit with Japan. The agency restrictions apply, for example, to crude oil, which alone accounted for 14 percent of imports in 1976 and 17 percent in 1985. Crude oil is a "permissible" import but can be imported only by the Chinese Petroleum Corporation, a giant state-owned enterprise.