Birth of the Opposition

On the morning of September 28, 1986, one hundred and thirty-five Dangwai activists gathered under the banner of a "campaign assistance committee" in the second-floor Ming Room of the Yuanshan Grand Hotel in Taipei. The announced agenda was to coordinate candidate nominations for the year-end supplementary elections to the central legislature; midway through, however, the participants overturned the planned program, moved and voted on the spot, and announced the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — a direct challenge to more than three decades of KMT one-party rule. With the ban on new parties still in force and martial law still in effect, it was a decision of enormous political risk: many in the room had steeled themselves for the possibility that everyone present would be arrested before the session adjourned, and some had brought a toothbrush and toiletries with them.

The danger was no abstraction. Just seven years earlier, during the Kaohsiung Incident, core Dangwai figures — Huang Hsin-chieh, Yao Chia-wen, Chang Chun-hung, and Lin Yi-hsiung — had been convicted of sedition and handed heavy sentences, and remained behind bars at that very moment; Shih Ming-teh had been sentenced to life imprisonment. To found a party was, in effect, to publicly take up their unfinished political cause while they were still imprisoned. It was precisely for this reason that the organizers designed the meeting as a decoy: a small inner circle — Hsieh Chang-ting, You Ching, Yu Shyi-kun, and others — had secretly drafted the party platform and charter in the preceding weeks, hedged by a careful calculation that Chiang Ching-kuo, already turning toward reform and arranging his own succession, would not order a sweeping sedition prosecution over a single party registration and destroy his reformist image in the process. The gamble held.

Two months after its founding, in November of the same year, the party convened its first national congress to elect a chairman. Chiang Peng-chien, who had served as a defense lawyer in the Kaohsiung Incident trials, narrowly defeated the veteran politician Fei Hsi-ping to become the DPP's first chairman. A lawyer who had spent years working on behalf of political prisoners and human rights cases, he took the post fully aware that he could be indicted and imprisoned at any time; on assuming office he openly acknowledged that he had long regarded a prison term as part of the job. Though his one-year tenure was brief, he steadied the party's organization and operations through its most fragile founding phase, laying the groundwork for Yao Chia-wen to take over as chairman after his release the following year, and for the party competition that followed.

The newborn DPP was no monolith but a coalition of political forces spanning a wide spectrum. Abroad, Hsu Hsin-liang, exiled in the United States, had long promoted an overseas party-building movement and repeatedly attempted to force his way back into Taiwan, echoing the founding effort on the island. On the island itself there were moderates, represented by Kang Ning-hsiang, who favored steady reform through parliamentary channels; the social-democratic New Tide line that fused democratic goals with labor and environmental movements; and radical Taiwan independence advocates who insisted the charter must ultimately embrace a plebiscite on the island's national future. How to address questions of national identity while pursuing democratization became a core issue the new party had to face from its very first day, and the debates over direction that followed would shape the DPP's development for the next three decades.

Confronted with this sudden act of party-building, the KMT protested loudly and briefly threatened to suppress it under the law, but ultimately chose to tolerate it, allowing this "illegal" party to operate in a legal grey zone until the lifting of martial law in 1987 and the amendment of the Civic Organizations Act in 1989 formally opened the door to party politics. This volume traces the DPP's path from secret preparations in law offices and magazine editorial rooms to its public founding at the Grand Hotel, and to its first chairman stepping into the breach amid the storm — showing how a single risk-laden weekend afternoon pried open the authoritarian framework and made multi-party democracy in Taiwan not only imaginable but institutionally irreversible.