Jungli Incident
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| Hanyu Pinyin | Zhōnglì Shìjiàn |
The Zhongli Incident was a riot in the Taiwanese town of Zhongli (now Zhongli District, Taoyuan City) in 1977 in response to the use of paper ballots in a local election, which voters believed increased the possibility that the election would be rigged.
In the 1950s and 1960s non-Kuomintang candidates could run for local positions in Taiwan, but were effectively barred from national or provincial posts because of a lack of resources and a government-controlled press that always supported the Kuomintang dictatorship. In the 1970s they began to coalesce into what came to be known as the Tangwai movement (literally "outside the party") though martial law under the Kuomintang prevented the formation of a unified opposition party. The movement gained strength from gradual emergence of a sense of Taiwanese identity and was emboldened by steps taken by Washington and Beijing toward normalization of diplomatic relations, undermining the Kuomintang's claim to be the legitimate government of all of China, including Taiwan. During local elections in 1977, the Kuomintang lost ground to Tangwai candidates.
In 1977, the loose group of opposition candidates won 34% of the vote in the elections for the Taiwan Provincial Assembly. The growing opposition began to have an effect inside the Kuomintang. One popular figure, Hsu Hsin-liang, left the party and ran as a Tangwai for a local county magistrate's position in November 1977. Hsu Hsin-liang was an unpredictable political figure, self labelled as a "socialist", who wanted to maintain the Taiwanese economic base while humanising its class structure. He vigorously advocated parliamentary democracy and Taiwan independence, and frequently attacked the state's political corruption and systematic violation of human rights. Hsu commonly spoke Hakka at public rallies, in defiance of the Kuomintang's insistence on Mandarin Chinese.
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