Democratization

30-second overview: On December 10, 1979, Chen Chu was dragged into a police van through tear-gas smoke on the streets of Kaohsiung. She was 29 years old. In prison she wrote her will, convinced she would be executed. Forty years later she became President of the Control Yuan — the head of Taiwan's highest government oversight body. Taiwan's democratization was not a single switch, but a forty-year experiment: from the world's longest martial law (38 years and 56 days) to one of Asia's freest democracies (Freedom House 2025 score: 93/100, sixth globally). No bloody revolution, no military coup.

On March 18, 1980, Taiwan's military court convened the Kaohsiung Incident (Formosa Incident) trial. In the dock sat Shih Ming-teh, Huang Hsin-chieh, Chen Chu, and Annette Lu; the gallery was packed with international journalists, and U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy had already entered Shih Ming-teh's case into the Congressional Record.

The Kuomintang had wanted a public trial to display judicial legitimacy. The result was the opposite.

The trial handed the defendants a national stage. Shih Ming-teh had prepared a sixty-thousand-word defense, but after learning at the opening session that Lin Yi-hsiung's mother and twin daughters had been murdered outside the prison (the Lin Family Massacre), he immediately abandoned his defense and demanded the judge sentence him to death. That image spread across the island through the media.

📝 Curator's note: The most absurd consequence of the Formosa Incident mass trial was that the group of young lawyers defending the accused — Chen Shui-bian, Frank Hsieh, Su Tseng-chang, Chang Chun-hsiung, Yu Ching — almost all became Taiwan's president, premier, or direct-municipality mayor within twenty years. The trial the KMT carefully orchestrated inadvertently groomed an entire generation of political elites for the opposition movement.

Cheng Nan-jung's Seventy-One Days

In the decade after the Formosa Incident trial, Taiwanese society was like a pot of water slowly heating. The Tangwai movement continued to expand, but the person who truly pushed the temperature to boiling was a mainlander named Cheng Nan-jung (鄭南榕).

On December 10, 1988 — International Human Rights Day — Cheng Nan-jung published the full text of a "Draft Constitution of the Republic of Taiwan" in issue 254 of the Freedom Era weekly magazine he edited. At the time this was tantamount to the crime of rebellion, punishable by death.

After receiving a court summons, Cheng Nan-jung barricaded himself in the magazine's office and refused to appear. He said a final sentence to his wife Yeh Chu-lan:

"The rest is up to you."

On the morning of April 7, 1989, nearly two hundred police officers surrounded the office. At 9:15 a.m., Cheng Nan-jung died by self-immolation at the age of 41. His magazine's back cover always bore the same line: "Fight for 100% freedom of speech!"

On May 19, tens of thousands of people followed his coffin through the rain toward the Presidential Office.

📝 Curator's note: The commander of the SWAT team that stormed the magazine office was Hou You-yi. Thirty-five years later, in 2024, he ran for president as the KMT candidate. The same person stood on the side of state violence during one of the most brutal moments in Taiwan's democratization, then competed for the highest power within a democratic system. This fact itself is the absurdity and complexity of Taiwan's history.

Cheng Nan-jung's death directly pushed the 1992 amendment of Article 100 of the Criminal Code and the abolition of the Statute for the Punishment of Rebellion. From that point on, thought was no longer a crime. April 7 was later designated "Freedom of Speech Day."

Lifting Martial Law: Not a Switch

On July 14, 1987, the 75-year-old Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) held a press conference at the Presidential Office, announcing that martial law would be lifted at midnight the following day. Twelve days later, on July 27, he invited twelve local community elders to the Presidential Office for tea and said a sentence that has since been repeatedly quoted:

"I have lived in Taiwan for forty years. I am Taiwanese, and of course also Chinese."

This sentence has since been selectively quoted across different political spectrums. Independence advocates take only the first half; unification advocates emphasize the second. But in the 1987 context, its function was to bridge the provincial-origin divide: a mainlander strongman acknowledging himself as Taiwanese, attempting to lower the temperature before the imminent political opening.

Chiang Ching-kuo died six months later.

But lifting martial law did not mean freedom. The government simultaneously passed the National Security Act, whose Article 9 stipulated that verdicts against civilians by military courts during the martial law period "may not be appealed to the competent courts." In other words, White Terror victims were legally blocked from any avenue of redress.

"Some scholars therefore argue that Taiwan's real democratization began in 1992 — when Article 100 of the Criminal Code was amended and the Statute for the Punishment of Rebellion was abolished — not in 1987 when martial law was lifted."

This is also why some people who lived through martial law remember that day not with joy but with bewilderment: you could demonstrate now, but who dared? You could form parties now, but would doing so get you arrested? Democracy is not a light you turn on with a single switch — it requires an entire society to relearn "how not to be afraid."

Six Thousand Wild Lilies vs. Tiananmen

On March 16, 1990 — less than nine months after Tiananmen — National Taiwan University students began a sit-in at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall plaza. The trigger was Lee Teng-hui's reelection as president, to be decided by a National Assembly still composed of members elected in China in 1947 — more than seven hundred representatives who had never stood for re-election: the so-called "Eternal Parliament" (萬年國會).

The students' banners read: "Countrymen, can you endure the oppression of 700 emperors?"

From a dozen people at the start, the crowd grew to nearly six thousand within six days. They held wild lilies (symbolizing the purity of a native Taiwanese flower) and put forward four demands: dissolve the National Assembly, abolish the Temporary Provisions, convene a National Affairs Conference, and set a reform timetable.

On March 21, Lee Teng-hui received fifty student representatives at the Presidential Office.

This was Tiananmen's mirror-image ending. Nine months earlier, students in Beijing received tanks; students in Taipei received the president's promise. Lee Teng-hui later said he had ordered "no harm to students" (quoted from ETtoday's 2015 report).

The promises were kept one by one: the Temporary Provisions were abolished in May 1991; the Eternal Parliament was dissolved in December of that year; the Legislative Yuan held its first full re-election in 1992; and on March 23, 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential election.

📝 Curator's note: The later life trajectories of the Wild Lily Student Movement's leaders are themselves a chapter of Taiwan's political history: Fan Yun became a DPP legislator, Lin Chia-lung became Foreign Minister, Lo Wen-jia became a DPP figure, Cheng Wen-tsan became Taoyuan Mayor. This movement did not merely change institutions — it defined the political character of an entire generation.

Voting Under Missiles

In March 1996, on the eve of Taiwan's first direct presidential election, China test-fired missiles 20 miles off Keelung and 29 miles off Kaohsiung, paralyzing 70% of commercial shipping through those two ports. The PLA simultaneously massed 100,000 troops along the coast.

Beijing's intent was clear: deter Taiwanese people from voting for Lee Teng-hui.

The U.S. response was to dispatch the aircraft carrier battle groups of USS Nimitz and USS Independence — the largest U.S. military deployment in the Pacific since the Vietnam War.

On March 23, voter turnout was 76.04%. Lee Teng-hui won 5,813,699 votes, with a 54% vote share. China's missiles not only failed to deter voters — they may have added approximately 5% to Lee's vote share, converting what would have been a plurality into an absolute majority.

Beijing's carefully planned intimidation produced the result it least wanted to see.

Three Transitions: The Character of the Defeated

What truly tests democracy is not elections, but "whether the losers are willing to leave."

2000: Chen Shui-bian won with 39.3% of the vote, ending 55 years of KMT rule. This was the first peaceful transfer of power through the ballot box in the Chinese-speaking world. KMT internal splits were decisive: James Soong left the party and won 37% of the vote, while Lien Chan took only 23%.

2008: Ma Ying-jeou defeated Frank Hsieh with 58.45%. The DPP peacefully relinquished power, proving that "accepting defeat" was not the KMT's exclusive domain.

2016: Tsai Ing-wen defeated Chu Li-luan with 56.12%. The KMT stepped down peacefully again.

2024: Lai Ching-te won with 40.05%; the DPP governed for the first time without a majority, while opposition parties controlled the Legislative Yuan. The democratic system underwent another stress test.

Four peaceful transitions of power in thirty years. No military coups, no refusals to transfer power, no violent protests.

Why No Bloodshed?

Eastern European revolutions overthrew Communist regimes, the Arab Spring sparked civil wars, Myanmar's military junta launched bloody repression. Why did Taiwan achieve a "quiet revolution"?

Political scientist Samuel Huntington in The Third Wave classified Taiwan as "transformation" — an elite-led, top-down democratization, distinct from South Korea's "transplacement" or the Philippines' "replacement."

But elites choosing reform had structural reasons behind it:

The economic miracle created a middle class. Between 1960 and 1990, Taiwan's per-capita GDP soared from $164 to $8,111. The middle class had too much to lose — they wanted reform, not revolution.

Diplomatic isolation forced the regime to seek legitimacy. After losing its UN seat (1971), U.S. diplomatic recognition (1979), and expulsion from the International Olympic Committee, the KMT could no longer use "counterattacking the mainland" as a governing justification; it had to build popular support within Taiwan.

Opposition self-restraint. The Formosa Incident activists and the DPP chose institutional reform over violent confrontation at critical junctures. The Philippines' People Power Revolution (EDSA, 1986) proved peaceful power transition was possible — an important signal for Taiwan's reform camp.

An Imperfect Democracy

Freedom House's 2025 score gave Taiwan 93 points (out of 100), ranked sixth globally, second in Asia (behind Japan's 96). The Economist's Democracy Index 2024 ranked Taiwan twelfth globally, with a perfect 10 for electoral process and pluralism — the only "full democracy" in Asia.

But behind the numbers are fractures:

During the White Terror period, an estimated 140,000 to 200,000 people suffered political persecution, with 3,000 to 4,000 executed. Transitional justice remains incomplete. Article 9 of the National Security Act was not ruled unconstitutional by the Grand Justices until 2019 — 32 years after martial law was lifted.

Disinformation is the new battleground. The 2018 local elections and the 2020 presidential election both saw large-scale disinformation operations, with many sources pointing abroad. The Chinese government continues attempting to influence Taiwan's policymaking, media, and democratic infrastructure (from Freedom House's 2025 report).

Blue-Green polarization has degraded the quality of policy discussion. Important legislation is frequently shelved or forced through based on partisan position rather than policy merit.

Taiwan's democracy is imperfect. But it is alive.

Chen Chu's Will

In December 1979, the 29-year-old Chen Chu wrote her will in prison, prepared to be executed. In her will she said farewell to the Taiwanese people.

She was not executed. She served six years in prison, came out and helped found the DPP, served two terms as Taipei City Director of Social Affairs, served as chairwoman of the Council of Labor Affairs, and served twelve years as Mayor of Kaohsiung. In her 2014 re-election she won 990,000 votes — the highest in Taiwan. In 2020 she was nominated as President of the Control Yuan.

From writing a will to President of the Control Yuan took forty-one years.

The same person, the same island. The only difference: in 1979's Taiwan, thought was a crime; in 2020's Taiwan, the former political prisoner oversees whether the government is committing crimes.

That is what democratization means. Not a smooth inspirational story, but a political experiment full of absurdity, contradiction, and cost. The experiment is still ongoing.

References

• CNA: Shih Ming-teh Spent More Than 25 Years as a Political Prisoner (primary)
• National Human Rights Museum: Chen Chu (primary)
• Wikipedia: Cheng Nan-jung
• Wikipedia: 1996 Republic of China Presidential Election
• Freedom House: Taiwan Freedom in the World 2025 (primary)
• The Economist Democracy Index 2024 (primary)
• Story Studio: The Trial That Changed Taiwan on March 18, 1980
• Taiwan Alliance for Truth and Reconciliation: National Security Act Article 9
• ETtoday: Lee Teng-hui Once Ordered No Harm to Students
• Washington Post: China Fails to Sway Election in Taiwan (1996)
• Samuel Huntington, _The Third Wave_, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991

Related Topics

• Martial Law Era: 38 years of authoritarian rule before democratization
• Taiwan's White Terror: The history of 140,000 politically persecuted
• 228 Incident: The starting point of postwar Taiwan's political trauma