The “426 Rally” that took place in Taipei on Saturday last week — branded with slogans such as: “fight green communism, resist dictatorship” — offered a striking window into the current political atmosphere in Taiwan.
Organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), the event was framed as a battle for democracy against an allegedly authoritarian administration under President William Lai (賴清德).
The rhetoric was colorful. The fearmongering was unmistakable. The turnout itself was hardly overwhelming — but the lineup on stage was certainly impressive, if not troubling.
Among those rallying against supposed dictatorship were the duly elected mayors of Taipei, New Taipei City and Taichung — standing in solemn indignation against the very democratic system that had delivered them to office. It was a spectacle both grand and absurd: Elected officials, proof of democracy’s endurance, now gathered to perform its funeral rites.
Moreover, one cannot help but note a deeper irony: If the KMT and TPP are so deathly afraid of dictatorship, should they not be 10 times more vocal against the real threat sitting across the Taiwan Strait? Should they not be holding rallies like this every week — targeting Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and rejecting any fantasy of unification?
As if to prove the absurdity further, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) stood at the rally and accused Lai of being “worse than a communist or fascist,” while TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) likened the elected president to a dictator silencing dissent.
If democracy is so fragile that lawful investigations and criticism amount to tyranny, one wonders how these same leaders would have survived under any real dictatorship. In their scramble to conjure a villain in Taipei, they seem to have forgotten where the real threat to Taiwan’s freedom lies — and whose silence they are so careful to maintain.
The fact that they could stage such a rally — freely, publicly, without interruption — already disproves the heart of their own accusation. Name a dictator in history, past or present, who would have allowed a gathering of tens of thousands to accuse him of tyranny under his very windows. From Mussolini to Stalin to Xi today, dictators do not tolerate such spectacles; they crush them. Yet here in Taiwan, the opposition flourishes, demonstrating in broad daylight, enjoying the very freedoms they claim are under siege.
The evidence for their grievance — that Lai’s administration is weaponizing the judiciary against them — is thin at best. What triggered the opposition’s outrage were the arrests and detentions of KMT-affiliated figures involved in fraudulent recall petition campaigns against Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers. Yet the courts, after reviewing evidence of forged signatures — including signatures of the deceased — found sufficient cause for detention based on risks of collusion and destruction of evidence.
It is a foundational principle of democracy that wrongdoing must be investigated, regardless of political affiliation. If being in the opposition confers immunity from legal scrutiny, then democracy itself is broken. What country would Taiwan become if electoral fraud, forgery and political corruption were simply waved away as “free speech” or a “partisan attack”?
What of the people who attended the rally? How many knew the real details behind the accusations? How many understood that the very act of protesting freely proves the survival and health of Taiwan’s democracy? How many simply repeated slogans without grappling with the facts?
Of course, the emotional appeal of a “resistance against dictatorship” is powerful. It taps into deep fears that any Taiwanese rightly harbors. Taiwan stands under the constant threat of a genuine dictatorship — not some imagined green-tinged tyranny in Taipei, but the gray, suffocating totalitarianism of Beijing.
It is right to be vigilant. It is right to resist dictatorship. However, misdirected vigilance serves no one except those who hope to weaken Taiwan from within.
It is thus not merely ironic, but profoundly alarming that the leaders of the KMT and TPP, while professing such passionate devotion to democracy, have in reality become willing enablers — and in some cases suspected collaborators — of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Especially within the KMT, the ideological drift toward Beijing has long since crossed the line from mere caution to dangerous complicity.
Their silence, their evasions and their growing alignment with the authoritarian regime across the Strait are not accidents, but choices.
No slogans shouted on Ketagalan Boulevard could scrub away the stain of consorting — ideologically or otherwise — with the very dictatorship that most threatens Taiwan’s survival.
If they truly cherish democracy — if they truly fear dictatorship — they should denounce Xi and the CCP. They must reject unification under any political arrangement dictated by Beijing.
They must resist not just the green-clad bogeyman they have invented, but the real red dragon looming to the west.
At this moment, a message must be sent to the leaders of the KMT and TPP: Xi is watching, and one wonders — do you even realize what you are doing?
To any visitor freshly arrived from Mars, hearing cries of “fight dictatorship” on Ketagalan Boulevard, the obvious conclusion would be that the rally was aimed squarely at Beijing, not at Taiwan’s own democratically elected president. Dictators, after all, loathe being called dictators.
By parading such slogans so loudly and publicly, did you forget to seek Beijing’s permission first? If not, and if I were Xi, I would be seething with rage — watching your words land not on Lai, but backfiring onto the very regime you have spent years cautiously appeasing. In your scramble to brand a domestic rival as a tyrant, you might have inadvertently crossed the real tyrant instead.
You are free to criticize Lai. You are free to rally. You are free to speak, publish and assemble. These are rights protected by the very democratic system you claim to be defending, but if you truly understand and value those freedoms, then your enemy is not some invented “green communism.” Your enemy is the bona fide dictatorship — and it wears not green, but red.
If Taiwan’s opposition parties forget this, if they choose short-term political gain over long-term democratic survival, they would not just lose elections. They would lose the people of Taiwan, forever.
So to all those who gathered on Saturday last week, to the leaders who stirred the crowds and to the citizens of Taiwan: Ask yourselves what you are truly opposing, and what you are truly defending.
The true test of democracy is not only how you govern when you win. It is how you behave when you lose — without inventing tyrants where none exist, and without forgetting the one real tyrant who watches and waits.
If you claim to fear dictatorship, then fear it where it truly threatens, not where it merely inconveniences your ambition.
John Cheng, a retired businessman from Hong Kong, now writes from Taiwan where he reflects on the shifting tides of his times.
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