Election.... from 1977

A friend who is cleaning out his grandfather's closets sent this to me:

This is an article we found hidden inside an old radio from November 5th, 1977.

It describes the upcoming local elections and describes how there are 58 candidates running with 41 representing he KMT and 17 dangwai.

This election would prove to be a watershed moment in Taiwan's democratic history as one of the dangwai candidates was none other than Hsu Hsin-Laing, and the ballot irregularities in his district would go on to spark the Chung-Li incident in which the regime was forced to show its weak hand amid rioting as they could no longer, politically, respond to civil unrest with large scale state violence, paving the way for further tests of the regime by the Formosa activists.

How far we have come. Even thinking back to before Chen was elected, I remember the inevitability of the KMT. They were always going to win and always control the government. They were seen, locally, as an entrenched power that had money and decades of patronage to draw from to bend society to its will.

Things have come far... "dangwai" are the candidates from outside the KMT. They would eventually coalesce to form the DPP.
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