During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德).
While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia.
Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its legacy of political violence. Even after Taiwan’s democratization, the KMT continues to revere its former authoritarian leader Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), whose human rights abuses in Taiwan during the White Terror period devastated countless families.
It is precisely because the KMT never had to face its own history of dictatorship that it can use the label so frivolously. It is also because Taiwanese society has not yet unequivocally named the abuses and the abuser that the manifestations of dictatorship have faded from its collective memory.
The rally was organized largely as a last-ditch effort to resist the investigations into allegations of fraud committed by the KMT in several recall petitions targeting Democratic Progressive Party officials. Prosecutors uncovered several instances in which KMT staff members were suspected to have forged signatures to meet the thresholds required to initiate recall votes. The KMT has attempted to frame the government’s investigations as evidence of authoritarian overreach.
However, this reverses the logic of democratic accountability. The key issue is not that the opposition is being investigated — it is that there is substantial and concrete evidence of fraud.
In Yilan County, three KMT staff members admitted forging documents, including signatures from deceased people, as reported in an online article by the Taipei Times (“Three KMT staffers held incommunicado over recall petition fraud,” April 25). Inspecting such misconduct is not a sign of dictatorship, it is a necessary function of the rule of law.
Meanwhile, the mass recall movement targeting KMT legislators is not only gaining momentum, but also expanding its appeal across social sectors. Perhaps most importantly, some KMT supporters have crossed party lines to sign the petitions to recall KMT legislators. These traditional KMT voters are reconsidering their allegiance, as they have become alarmed by how the party seems increasingly comfortable with and even supportive of Beijing’s authoritarian rule and military aggression toward Taiwan.
As reported by Domino Theory, a growing sentiment among the party’s base is that, while they do not intend to annihilate the KMT, they want to make its leaders “think about what their stance on China is.”
The KMT’s attempt to cast legal investigations into alleged fraud as political persecution distorts the principles of democratic accountability and yet this very distortion has sparked a moment of unexpected political clarity.
In a society long divided by partisanship and historical tensions, diverse voices are converging around a shared recognition that the defense of democratic norms transcends traditional allegiances.
Three decades ago, when Taiwan embraced a peaceful transition to democracy in lieu of processes of truth and reconciliation, it might have inadvertently missed an opportunity to internalize the necessary lessons from the KMT’s authoritarian rule. In exposing the danger in the conflation of democratic accountability with dictatorship, the current crisis might begin to catalyze the consolidation of civic solidarity based on democratic norms rather than ethnicity or party loyalty.
Lo Ming-cheng is a professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis whose research addresses civil society, political cultures and medical sociology.
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