Chung-li incident

The Chung-li incident (zh-tp|t=中壢事件|p=Zhōnglì Shìjiàn) was a 1977 riot in the Taiwanese town of Chung-li. It was in response to the use of paper ballots in a local election, which increased the possibility that the election could be rigged.

Historical background

In Taiwan, between 1971 and 1977, an opposition group of politicians and candidates for political office began to cohere. At this stage it was not a party (martial law prevented the formation of one). Taiwanese politicians not linked to the KMT had been able to run for office and had done so (especially in local government elections) during the 1950's and 1960's. Few of them were elected to national or provincial posts, largely because of their lack of resources, organisation and the fact that the government controlled press always supported the single party KMT dictatorship. The gradual emergence of a sense of Taiwanese identity and the accumulation of discontent meant that electoral oppositionists (known as the tangwai, people outside the party) began to attract more support. They were helped by an international factor, the normalisation of relations between Washington and Beijing. Since the KMT's legitimacy was based so much on the idea that it was the real government of China, the obvious fact that most of the world did not believe it to be so, damaged its domestic prestige. At the local elections in 1977, the KMT lost ground to tang-wai candidates.

Incident

In the same year, this loose grouping of oppositionists won 34% of the vote in the elections for the Taiwan Provincial Assembly. The growing opposition began to have an effect inside the KMT. One popular figure, Hsu Hsin-liang, left the party and ran as a tangwai for a local county magistrate's position in November 1977. Afraid that the KMT would rig the ballot, 10,000 of Hsu's supporters gathered in the town of Chung-li to object to the paper ballots being used. A riot, since then known as the "Chung-li incident", ensued [ [http://www.cwcmf.org/Taiwan/html/chap5_political.html The Unknown Taiwan, Political Developments] ] . It was the first political protest on the streets since the 1940's. Hsu Hsin-liang was an unpredictable political figure, self labelled as a "socialist" who wanted to maintain the Taiwanese economic base while humanising its class structure. But he vigorously advocated parliamentary democracy and Taiwan independence, and frequently attacked the KMT's corruption and systematic violation of human rights. More galling still, Hsu commonly spoke Hakka at public rallies, in defiance of the KMT's obsession with Mandarin Chinese. Realising the election fraud, thousands of workers rioted, burning down the Chung-li police station. The KMT called in soldiers to suppress the riot (some 90% of whom were Taiwanese youths) and in response the protestors, en masse, cried out that the state was "beating the fellow Taiwanese". Since the event, the regime's policy of riot control has been to use police and military police for such purposes. The "Chung-li Incident" gave previously atomised dissidents a surge of hope.

Legacy

Two years later (in December 1979) the state set out to smash the parliamentary democracy forces (and no doubt to atone for the humiliation it experienced at Chung-li) by arresting all of the leaders of the anti KMT movement who had organised a gathering at Kaohsiung on International Human Rights Day. The purge is known as the Ilha Formosa Meilitao Incident or, more simply, the Kaohsiung Incident [ [http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/lab/85/minns.html#FOOT16 Minns, John and Robert Tierney, The Labour Movement in Taiwan. Labour History 85 (Nov 2003): 92 pars. 27 Dec. 2006] ] . The entire leadership was sentenced to long prison terms, including Chen Chu, later Head of the Council for Labour Affairs in the Chen Shui-bian Democratic Progressive Party government and since December 2006, Major of Kaohsiung, and Shi Ming-teh, labelled as Taiwan's Nelson Mandela who was handed a life-sentence, liberated with the arrival of democracy and has lately been leading an anti corruption movement against the current DPP administration, despite the cancer he suffers.

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