Democratizing Oriental Despotism

Both China and Taiwan have fairly similar political cultures. However, the Chinese intellectual and political elite have, by and large, failed to democratize the Middle Kingdom since 1919 when they started the 4 May Movement to bring 'Mr D' (democracy) and 'Mr S' (science) to the land of the Yellow Emperor. This is in sharp contrast to their counterpart in Taiwan which has been relatively successful in bringing the island state into a primary stage of democracy in just over four decades since 1947, when the infamous 28 February uprising erupted. From a careful examination of methods of democratization applied by both elites, the author finds that the former, as shown in their words and deeds in the 4 June Tiananmen tragedy, tried primarily to change the psycho-cultural make-up of the Chinese people; whilst the latter pushed to win elections and to form political organizations, particularly parties, to fight the Kuomintang authoritarian rule. Thus, in the bloody 4 June Tiananmen tragedy, China's prodemocracy students and intellectuals did not bring about any institutional change to the communist one-party dictatorship. On the other side of the Taiwan Straits, Taiwanese oppositionists emerged in the 28 June 1990 National Affairs Conference and subsequent elections to become an institutional threat, indeed a viable democratic alternative, to the Kuomintang authoritarian rule.