The Dangwai Movement
Under one-party authoritarian rule, a group of courageous Taiwanese chose to seek political participation outside the KMT system. "Dangwai" (literally "outside the party") — originally a neutral administrative term describing non-KMT candidates permitted to contest limited local offices — gradually evolved into a sweeping democratic movement that coordinated lawyers, professors, journalists, shopkeepers, and former political prisoners into something approaching a shadow opposition without the legal right to call itself one.
Beginning with supplementary elections in the 1970s, Dangwai candidates used street speeches at temple squares, mimeographed underground publications passed from hand to hand, and boisterous campaign rallies as weapons to challenge the authoritarian system. Each election cycle produced new martyrs, new slogans, and new networks: candidates who lost on election day often spent the next three years building the next campaign, traveling between townships to distribute sermon-like addresses on constitutional reform, lifting martial law, and the right of Taiwanese to elect their own president.
The founding of Formosa Magazine in 1979 marked the Dangwai movement's transformation from scattered individual actions …
The founding of Formosa Magazine in 1979 marked the Dangwai movement's transformation from scattered individual actions into an organized political force with bureau offices across the island, an editorial line that linked human rights to economic justice, and a rally calendar that rivaled the state's own ceremonial life. Kang Ning-hsiang represented the moderate parliamentary wing, Huang Hsin-chieh bridged factions as publisher and strategist, and Shih Ming-teh — veteran of the White Terror prisons — carried the movement's uncompromising moral charge; together they formed a leadership that the regime could neither co-opt nor cleanly destroy.
This volume chronicles the Dangwai movement's journey from inception to maturity, presenting how a group of people who refused to stay silent carved a path for democracy within the confines of authoritarianism, and how the rehearsal years of speeches, magazines, and street rallies supplied the organizational muscle memory that would later make a party, an election victory, and a peaceful transfer of power thinkable at all.
The Dangwai had no party headquarters, no party assets, and no access to television. They had three things: the microphone at a campaign rally, magazines printed on coarse paper, and one election after another. In the five-office local elections of 1977 they took an unprecedented number of county magistracies and provincial assembly seats; that November, a suspected ballot-rigging incident in Chungli brought a crowd around the local police station — the Chungli Incident. After that night, a good many people came to believe that "the crowd" actually existed. Losing a race did not disband anything. Cassette tapes of the rally speeches circulated in markets and taxis, the volunteer rosters became the next campaign's organization, and the same people turned up three years later at a podium in another county. They knew exactly what they were doing: in a place where a party could not be founded, they were using elections to build the shape of one first. By the day the party was actually founded in 1986, the rosters, the donors, the speeches and the crowds were already in place.
Cover of Formosa Magazine's inaugural issue, August 1979, the flagship publication of the Dangwai movement whose nationwide branches coordinated pre-Kaohsiung Incident democratic advocacy.
National Central Library periodical collection
Formosa Magazine publisher Huang Hsin-chieh addressing a Dangwai campaign rally in southern Taiwan, autumn 1979, weeks before the Kaohsiung Incident.
Formosa Magazine photo archive
Isle of Time