The Kaohsiung Incident, a peaceful human rights protest, was the beinnning of the end of 40 years of one-party rule in Taiwan.
In some cases it starts with a plumber scaling a Polish shipyard wall or a group of schoolchildren protesting the compulsory teaching of Afrikaans. Other times, it is activists mobilizing to challenge attempts to steal an election or referendum.
Recent history provides plenty of cases in which individual or collective acts of courage, often in inauspicious circumstances, provided the spark for democratic transitions, sometimes relatively rapid, sometimes painfully protracted.
Authoritarians have, of course, learned the lessons of history and adapted their repressive techniques and technologies accordingly. But the justifiable celebrations of the 1989 velvet revolutions should not be allowed to suffocate the 30th anniversary of another historic transition.
Thirty years ago this week, on the evening of December 10, 1979, a small group of Taiwan’s fledgling opposition assembled for a peaceful human rights demonstration in the southern city of Kaohsiung. The authorities’ violent suppression of the gathering, now known as the Kaohsiung Incident, proved to be the catalyst for widespread protests that ended 40 years of Kuomintang one-party rule.
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