In Taiwan’s Elections, China Seems to Want a Vote

The first time I covered a Taiwan “election,” 38 years ago, the island was a dictatorship under martial law, with members of the opposition more likely to be tortured than to gain power.

Government officials explained that modern democracy wasn’t fully compatible with Chinese culture, and one of my minders made a vague inquiry about paying me — apparently to see if a Times correspondent could be bribed.

Taiwan lifted martial law the next year, 1987, and helped lead a democratic revolution in Asia, encompassing South Korea, Mongolia, Indonesia and others. Taiwan now ranks as more democratic than the United States, Japan or Canada, according to the most recent ratings by the Economist Intelligence Unit, and the island is now caught up in boisterous campaigning for presidential and legislative elections on Saturday.

(The campaigning has mostly gone smoothly but not entirely so: As a gimmick, one Taiwanese party handed out 460,000 laundry detergent pods to win support. Some voters unfortunately mistook the pods for food.)