The Zhongli Incident: How a Tampered Ballot Ignited the Path to Local Democracy

30-Second Overview: On November 19, 1977, Hsu Hsin-liang ran for Taoyuan County Magistrate, facing the KMT-nominated Ou Hsien-yu. At the Zhongli Elementary School polling station, ballots cast for Hsu Hsin-liang by two elderly voters were declared invalid. Word spread along the streets to the Zhongli Substation opposite. By nightfall, the afternoon crowd had surrounded the police station, which was then set ablaze. This incident involved overturned vehicles, tear gas, casualties, and arson. It also produced a consequence harder to capture in photographs: ballots transformed from paper arranged by party insiders into public evidence that must be displayed before the eyes of the people.

Incident Data Card

This table divides the incident into four layers. The date and election bring the reader back to the specific voting day and local politics. The starting point explains how the controversy began with a single ballot. The key spaces remind the reader that the Zhongli Incident did not occur only within the police substation; the polling station, the road, the station, and news dissemination together constituted the scope of the incident. The final layer of subsequent significance connects the night’s conflicts with later democratization, avoiding the reduction of the two into a single causal link.

Hsu Hsin-liang Left the Party Before Entering This Polling Station

Hsu Hsin-liang did not start on the opposite side of the Kuomintang (KMT). In 1977, he was a KMT-affiliated Provincial Assembly member who had his party membership expelled in October after openly criticizing party policies and publishing Voice of the Storm and Acting with Courage. By November 19, he ran for Taoyuan County Magistrate as a non-partisan candidate, facing Ou Hsien-yu, who had been nominated by the KMT. ^{1 2}

Hsu Hsin-liang grew up within the party but later left, taking with him a familiarity with local governance and elections. He used the ballot to demand that Taoyuan residents make a judgment, giving the Zhongli Incident a background different from a simple street conflict. English reporting by The Reporter documents how Hsu Hsin-liang gathered young workers, local relatives and friends, and Non-Party Coalition figures during the campaign, designing campaign songs, evening policy forums, and intensive ballot-monitoring efforts. These practices later became familiar scenes in Taiwan’s elections, but at the time, they still resembled an experiment mixing campus clubs, local temple courtyards, and modern campaigning. ²

Caption: The front station of the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) Zhongli Station, photographed by author mingwangx in 2006. The Wikimedia Commons archive page indicates CC BY-SA 3.0. The image depicts the present-day urban site, not a photograph from the 1977 incident. ³

Hsu Hsin-liang’s campaign team divided Taoyuan into a place that needed to be reorganized. They proposed "New Spirit, New Figures, New Taoyuan," rewriting campaign songs using Minnan folk tunes, so that campaigning was no longer just about candidate photos and policy leaflets. Academic research reminds us that this election cannot be understood solely through the binary of the Non-Party Coalition versus the KMT. The KMT’s nomination process, Taoyuan’s local factions, and split-ticket voting between the County Magistrate and Provincial Assembly elections were all local political conditions for Hsu Hsin-liang’s victory. ⁴

Curator’s Note: The Zhongli Incident entered the streets through a campaign song. The song moved politics from the conference room into the sounds familiar to residents, making local participation no longer dependent solely on the candidate’s policy leaflets.

Zhongli Elementary School: The Controversy Began with One Ballot

On the morning of November 19, Taoyuan County was holding elections for five public offices: County Magistrate, Taiwan Provincial Assembly Member, Taipei City Councilor, County Councilor, and Township Mayor. Zhongli Elementary School was one of the polling stations. Election official Fan Chiang Hsin-lin was accused of marking two ballots cast for Hsu Hsin-liang by elderly voters as invalid. Different sources offer inconsistent details. Some records state that ink pads were used to leave marks on the ballots, while others relay that the election official explained the invalidity based on voting rules. What is certain is that the controversy was not resolved calmly within the polling station but quickly spread outside the school gates. ^{5 6}

Zhongli Elementary School is located directly opposite the Zhongli Substation. When the prosecutor took the elderly voters and witnesses to the police station, yet left the accused election official at the polling station to continue working, what the crowd saw was no longer just "whether this ballot counts." They saw an asymmetrical procedure: those pointing out problems were taken away, while those holding the ballots remained in place. Consider the local memory preserved in this article, describing this space as a short but crucial political route. The school gate, the road, and the police substation were connected into one event within a few hours. ⁶

This spatial relationship also explains why the incident did not stop at the polling station. If Zhongli Elementary School and the police substation were far apart, the news might have remained confined to a few witnesses. Facing each other, the crowd could directly bring their suspicions about election management to the door of state power. Case summaries from the National Archives Information Network record scenes of the night: protests against electoral injustice, citizens overturning vehicles, speeches via loudspeakers, and police and military blocking the crowd. The archives also preserve 170 pages of evidence-gathering photographs, ensuring this incident exists not only in later oral histories. ⁷

From the Substation Door to the Whole Street

In the afternoon, the number of people gathering outside the Zhongli Substation increased. A historical report in Taipei Times describes the crowd overturning police cars, rushing into the substation to damage items, police deploying tear gas, and finally the substation building being burned. A 40th-anniversary program produced by Hakka Television describes the night as a ten-thousand-person siege and a fire at the police substation, presenting local memory as two deaths and one severe injury. These narratives collectively point to a night spiraling out of control, but regarding whether police fired guns, the number of casualties, and the identity of the arsonist, we cannot simply choose one version as the final answer. ^{5 8}

In 2025, the Control Yuan released investigation results regarding the Zhongli Incident. The investigation team reviewed 72 volumes and 8,050 pages of archives and interviewed relevant figures including Hsu Hsin-liang and Chang Chun-hung. The Control Yuan pointed out that archives from the General Staff Headquarters and other agencies at the time had multiple inconsistencies with interviews and other data, and confirmed that ballot tampering indeed occurred in the 1977 election. The investigation also noted that 19-year-old Jiang Wenguo died in a coma after suffering a penetrating head wound; his body was cremated quickly, and justice has not yet been sufficiently served. ⁹

This report adds a new reading thread to the Zhongli Incident, but we cannot pour later verification results back into 1977. The crowd that night did not know how many volumes the Control Yuan would review 48 years later. They only knew that the procedures before them did not answer questions, and the power dynamics at the police substation door were harder than those at the polling station. Today’s readers need to see two things simultaneously: the procedures that night did not answer the crowd’s doubts, and the records left by the authoritarian government afterward were mutually conflicting.

Curator’s Note: The most difficult aspect of the Zhongli Incident lies in the fact that different agencies preserved inconsistent versions of each other. The work of transitional justice must first acknowledge that archives are not naturally transparent windows; sometimes they are also the smoke left by power.

Hsu Hsin-liang’s Victory Does Not Equal the Legitimization of All Street Actions

Hsu Hsin-liang ultimately defeated Ou Hsien-yu by a margin of over 100,000 votes. The Reporter, Taipei Times, and Think Magazine all view this victory as an inescapable result of the incident. Hsu Hsin-liang did not gain ballots because the crowd burned the police station; he had already established a campaign organization, proposed local policies, and made himself a familiar candidate to Taoyuan people through long-term street campaigning. The Zhongli Incident made election officials at all polling stations countywide more careful about displaying ballots, giving a local election institutional consequences extending beyond the county magistrate’s term. ^{2 5 6}

But writing the incident as "the people burned the police station, so democracy won" is equally dangerous. Burning public buildings, overturning vehicles, and causing casualties cannot automatically become justified because of later democratization results. The anger preserved in local memory and the violence the state must pursue accountability for are not two accounts that cancel each other out. The Zhongli Incident is worth remembering precisely because it simultaneously contains the political causes of electoral injustice, the destructive consequences of crowd actions, the coercive responses of police and military, and the government’s subsequent control over archives and news.

Caption: The Wikimedia Commons archive page records that author Foxy Who photographed the rear station of Zhongli Station in 2011, under CC BY-SA 3.0 license. This is a present-day scene and cannot be used as a photograph of the 1977 incident site. ¹⁰

The fact that domestic media did not report the incident fully the next day is also part of this history. The Control Yuan article organizes the gap between international and domestic reporting at the time, pointing out that foreign correspondents in Taiwan reported to overseas media, while major domestic newspapers did not feature relatively complete coverage until several days later. This information fracture allowed Zhongli residents to know what they had experienced, but made it difficult for people in other parts of the island to know simultaneously. The incident indeed occurred, but was fragmented into the memories of local residents, news from overseas media, and the version of official archives. ⁹

Why It Became a Watershed for Democratization

Zhongli in 1977 was not a nationwide revolution. It occurred in the Taoyuan County Magistrate election, starting from a local polling station, and the participants were not a team pre-convened by a single political organization. Academic research places it back in local politics, reminding us to note Taoyuan’s factional alliances, candidate nominations, and split-ticket voting. This local expansion enlarged the participants of democratization; Taipei intellectuals and central political figures were no longer the sole drivers. ⁴

Taipei Times cites research indicating that the Zhongli Incident led Non-Party Coalition figures to begin cooperating more organizationally and reduced the fear of some intellectuals participating in politics. The Non-Party Coalition election assistance groups at the end of 1978, the later Formosan Incident, and the street and election mobilizations of the 1980s can all see certain pioneering forms in Zhongli. The evening gatherings, loudspeaker vehicles, campaign songs, and large-character posters used by Hsu Hsin-liang’s campaign team later became the basic grammar of Taiwan’s elections. ⁵

The KMT government also learned another lesson from Zhongli. Central elections and political activities were postponed in 1978 due to diplomatic and political situations; the authoritarian regime did not immediately open up because of one county magistrate victory. Zhongli is not a straight-line democratic progress history; it is more like a fissure. The fissure allows people to see power that was originally hidden, and gives the rulers time to patch it back with new control methods.

This is the relationship between the Zhongli Incident and later democratic experiences. It did not directly create party alternation, nor did it immediately make elections fair. It first let local residents know that ballots could be guarded, that election officials’ decisions could be questioned, and that the police substation was not necessarily the last place where one could speak. Once this cognition appeared, subsequent elections could no longer maintain order relying solely on party nominations and closed ballot-counting procedures.

After One Ballot, Who Else Was Not Written In?

The photographs left by the Zhongli Incident are powerful. People stand before the police station, vehicles are overturned, glass shatters on the ground, and loudspeakers carry voices across the streets. But photographs do not automatically tell us who took the picture, who was photographed, and who did not appear in the lens. Nor do they answer how Jiang Wenguo’s family spent the years, or whether those investigated and listed in archives ever had the opportunity to correct official records.

The Control Yuan’s 2025 recommendations suggest preserving the site of injustice, reconstructing historical memory, and repurposing space so that the Zhongli Incident becomes an educational site for rule of law and transitional justice. This recommendation is not merely about setting up a memorial plaque in Zhongli. It requires the government to acknowledge that the police substation, polling station, and streets were once sites of conflict between state power and people’s rights, allowing later residents to understand this conflict at the site. ⁹

Caption: This seal was photographed by Solomon203 inside Zhongli Station in 2016. The Wikimedia Commons archive page indicates CC BY-SA 4.0. It is not a 1977 incident photo; the article uses it to illustrate that the station space still retains material traces of the railway police system. ¹¹

The front station of Zhongli Station today looks like an entry point for daily transportation. People buy tickets, wait for trains, and pass through underground passages, usually not thinking that news from 1977 once spread along the station plaza and the North-South trunk road. The architecture does not speak for history unless someone reconnects the location, people, and institutions. Local democracy is a continuous action where a group of people are willing to see clearly every ballot in the polling station, question procedures on the streets, and finally demand the government write errors back into the archives.

The Zhongli Incident cannot be reduced to a hero poster, nor can it remain only a burned police substation. What it truly leaves behind is a difficult democratic question: when people no longer believe ballots will be calculated fairly, should the government rely on more police force to maintain order, or on more transparent procedures to regain trust? The 1977 answer was not pretty, even carrying fire and wounds. Taiwan later chose to gradually let ballots be publicly displayed, let opponents run for office, and let archives be questioned, precisely because Zhongli had already proven that order without procedure will eventually catch fire on the streets.

How a Local Event Left Shadows on National Institutions

The locality of the Zhongli Incident can also be seen from election organization. The 1977 Taoyuan County Magistrate election was not an isolated county magistrate duel; on the same day, there were Provincial Assembly, County Council, and Township Mayor elections. Candidates at different levels shared the same local organizations, kinship networks, and polling stations, but voters did not necessarily cast all their ballots for the same camp. These differences mean the County Magistrate election cannot be simply seen as a local projection of central party power. Luo Kuo-chu’s research analyzes this split-ticket voting within local factions and nomination politics, reminding us that Hsu Hsin-liang’s victory cannot be explained solely as the central regime suddenly losing to street anger. Taoyuan local society already had its own interests, figures, and choices.

This judgment also explains why Hsu Hsin-liang’s campaign methods were so critical. He did not wait for a national opposition party to build a stage for him; instead, he set up the campaign headquarters locally, sent young workers into the countryside, and turned propaganda into repeatable sounds and actions. Folk songs, loudspeaker vehicles, large-character posters, and evening gatherings allowed voters to repeatedly encounter elections in markets, on roads, and at home doors. This modern campaign form coexisted with traditional local human relations and networks, neither detaching from Taoyuan’s social networks nor transforming local networks into mobilizable political organizations. This organizational experience could still be found traces in different elections and social movements later. ^{2 4 6}

Electoral transparency also left institutional shadows from here. Taipei Times cites Hu Hui-ling’s compilation, pointing out that after the Zhongli Incident, election officials were more careful about displaying and reading aloud each ballot during counting. This change seems merely a procedural detail, but actually rearranges power. When every ballot must be publicly displayed, election officials can no longer just ask voters to believe them. The procedure begins to require agencies to prove to voters how ballots are recognized, calculated, and preserved. ⁵

The news blockade at the time shows that voting transparency and information transparency are two different things. Even if ballots in the polling station were read aloud one by one, if the incident disappeared from newspapers, people in other regions could still not judge whether the local government handled the controversy properly. The Control Yuan’s later compilation of foreign reports and the time lag in domestic news made this problem clearer: democratic systems need not only watchable voting, but also the ability for society to discuss what went wrong with the voting. Without media public memory, election controversies easily remain only private legends among locals. ⁹

The archival work of the Zhongli Incident therefore cannot serve only scholars. Case files, photos, and investigation materials from the police preserved in the National Archives Information Network allow researchers to compare how agencies at the time described the crowd, and allow later official investigations the opportunity to point out which records and interviews do not match. The Control Yuan’s recommendation to preserve sites of injustice is precisely to reconnect archives with locations. The polling station explains electoral procedure, the police substation explains how the state responded to protest, and the station and roads explain how news passed through the city. Only when these three spaces are placed together can the full scale of the incident be seen.

Local memory must also retain uncomfortable parts. Those supporting Hsu Hsin-liang may view Zhongli as a successful defense of ballots, while memories of police and public order will remember vehicles overturned, buildings burned, and personnel injured. Transitional justice must handle the responsibilities of different roles item by item, not leaving only the version most favorable to contemporary positions. Electoral fraud must be investigated, crowd destruction must be explained, whether police and military used excessive force must be investigated, and Jiang Wenguo’s death and his family’s requests cannot be covered by the victory result.

Zhongli in 1977 let Taiwan see a problem that reappears repeatedly: whether institutions can provide believable appeal paths before crises occur. If polling stations could handle doubts in real time, prosecutors could treat witnesses and the accused equally, and media could let the nation see the scene, crowds would not need to bring anger to the police station door.

After the Zhongli Incident, Taiwan still experienced the Formosan Incident, martial law lifting, and multiple election controversies. Democracy was not completed in one go; institutions only learned how to let people see them working from wound after wound. This is also why the Zhongli Incident is still worth preserving. Local archives, family memories, and electoral systems need to be preserved together, so history will not leave only the voices of victors and rulers. Later generations, if looking only at results, easily forget that institutional change often begins with local inequality and controversy. It places election procedures, street protests, press freedom, and archival responsibility in the same place, forcing later generations to acknowledge that democracy needs to be maintained, not just praised and retold on memorial days.

Further Reading

• 40 Years of the Zhongli Incident — Hakka Television program, suitable for reading alongside the local audiovisual narrative of this article.
• Taiwan in Time: Burning down the establishment — English historical report from Taipei Times, extending understanding of the incident and subsequent Non-Party Coalition organization.
• 37th Anniversary Memorial of the Zhongli Incident — Local memory article by Chiu Wan-hsing, providing campaign songs, ballot monitoring, and street scenes.

References