ABSTRACT
In Chapter 7 I outlined how the lessons of the civil war and conflicting elements of the KMT’s party ideology led to cracks in the authoritarian edifice. In this chapter I will examine how the Taiwanese democracy movement has exploited the inherent weaknesses of the KMT party-state. The case of Taiwan differs from the experience of the mainland Chinese democracy movement insofar as from 1969 onwards the door to electoral contestation on the national level was opened. Prior to 1969, opposition to the KMT regime was highly individualised and sporadic. The attempt by mainland Chinese intellectual Lei Zhen to form an opposition party in the late 1950s ended in political suppression and a ten-year jail sentence for Lei. Another call for an end to KMT one-party rule and the establishment of constitutional democracy by Taiwanese professor Peng Ming-min in 1964 resulted in an eight-year jail sentence for Peng. 1
