On November 19, 1977, Taoyuan County held its magistrate election under martial law. That year, independent candidate Hsu Hsin-liang had gained strong grassroots support, turning Taoyuan into a national focal point. But on the afternoon of election day, allegations of ballot tampering at the Zhongli Elementary School polling station triggered what would become the Zhongli Incident. According to contemporary reports and later investigations, the school principal—serving as the polling supervisor—was accused on the spot by voters of interfering with voting procedures and even stuffing ballots. What angered the public further was that when prosecutors arrived, they removed the citizens who reported the fraud but allowed the accused principal to remain in his post. To the crowd, this signaled that judicial and administrative authorities were protecting those in power rather than acting impartially. This perception immediately intensified public resentment and pushed the situation toward escalation.

As news spread rapidly through Zhongli, more and more residents converged on the polling station demanding an investigation. Confrontations between police and citizens quickly broke out, and order began to collapse. Later in the afternoon, some people started throwing stones at the polling station—marking the first instance of physical violence. As tensions continued to rise, the protest spilled over to the Zhongli Police Precinct. By dusk, several thousand people had surrounded the precinct. For Taiwan under martial law, protests of this scale over an election were extremely rare. The crowd demanded that police clarify the election irregularities and investigate the officials involved. Some people threw rocks at the precinct and damaged police vehicles, further straining the atmosphere. Police fired rounds of tear gas to disperse the crowd, but failed to bring the situation under control.

Shortly after 7 p.m., gunshots were heard. Later investigations confirmed that at least three civilians were shot, two of whom died: Chiang Wen-kuo, a student at National Central University, and nineteen-year-old Chang Chih-ping of Zhongli; another youth was seriously injured. The shootings caused the protest to spiral completely out of control and became the critical turning point of the confrontation. Decades later, questions about who gave the order to fire, who pulled the trigger, and how responsibility should be assigned remain unresolved and are central to transitional justice inquiries.

Following the gunfire, public anger surged dramatically. Many sources indicate that police withdrew en masse from the precinct at some point during the night. The building was subsequently damaged and set on fire. The blaze lasted more than two hours, destroying the main precinct building, police dormitories, and nearby structures. Under the restrictions of martial-law-era information control, the authorities framed the event as a “riot by violent mobs.” However, later academic studies broadly agree that the incident cannot be reduced to simple destruction of property; rather, it reflected the eruption of long-accumulated structural tensions—electoral injustice, procedural failure, the collapse of trust between officials and citizens, and the backlash against prolonged authoritarian rule.

After the unrest subsided, the government ordered a recount of ballots in an effort to appease public anger. Hsu Hsin-liang ultimately won the election. Many scholars view this as a rare moment in which the state, under immense social pressure, was forced into concession. The Zhongli Incident has since been widely regarded as a prelude to Taiwan’s democratization: it was the first large-scale popular uprising triggered by election fraud in the postwar era and revealed the legitimacy crisis facing Taiwan’s system of “limited elections.”

Subsequent research commonly interprets the Zhongli Incident as a precursor to the Kaohsiung (Formosa) Incident of 1979 and the street protests of the 1980s. It demonstrated that Taiwanese society was no longer willing to passively accept a one-way authoritarian political order and had begun questioning and challenging abuses of state power.

In the spring of 1980, eight leading figures of the Formosa Magazine movement stood trial before a military court. This became one of Taiwan’s most internationally visible political trials, drawing close attention from U.S. media, Congress, and human rights organizations. Although the defendants were ultimately sentenced, the trial had the opposite effect of what the state intended: opposition leaders gained public legitimacy, and for the first time, citizens clearly recognized the key figures of the democracy movement. These individuals became symbols of democratic resistance, and authoritarian repression inadvertently helped cultivate the next generation of democratic leaders.

During the Formosa trial, a major political shock occurred: the Lin family massacre. Lin Yi-hsiung’s mother and twin daughters were brutally murdered in broad daylight. At the time, Lin’s house was under surveillance by the Taiwan Garrison Command, yet nothing was done to prevent the attack. The case remains unsolved, and the public widely believes it was an act of political intimidation by the security apparatus. The incident had enormous psychological impact—public fear of the authoritarian state reached its peak, and for the opposition, democratic reform became a matter of survival rather than ideology.

In the following years, political incidents continued to accumulate. The 1981 death of Chen Wen-chen, a U.S.-based Taiwanese scholar, became another watershed moment. As mentioned earlier, Chen was interrogated by the Taiwan Garrison Command after returning to Taiwan, and the next day was found dead on the National Taiwan University campus. The government declared it a suicide, but glaring inconsistencies immediately undermined credibility. Around the same period, several writers and dissidents disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances, further eroding public trust in the security apparatus. The authoritarian regime’s legitimacy began a steady decline from this point onward.

In response, opposition activists built more durable organizational structures—press conferences, legal defense networks, magazine groups, and campaign teams. Although Formosa Magazine was banned, it left enormous intellectual influence. New magazines such as Deep Plowing, Penglai Island, The Eighties, and Modern Women became important forums for dissenting ideas. In 1984, Taiwanese-American writer Henry Liu (Chiang Nan) was assassinated in the United States by gangsters acting under orders from Taiwan’s Military Intelligence Bureau, after publishing works critical of the Chiang Ching-kuo regime. This was one of the most severe international scandals of Taiwan’s authoritarian era. After the FBI solved the case, the White House expressed outrage and exerted direct pressure on Taipei. Chiang Ching-kuo was forced to discipline the intelligence agency, and the internal contradictions of authoritarian rule became impossible to ignore. Reformists within the ruling party gained strength, and the international community recognized that Taiwan’s authoritarian system had reached its limits.