The Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek, which fled to Taiwan after losing China's civil war, initially shared the Communists' lust for power and were quite willing to use brute force to crush those who sought greater freedom, including a brutal crushing of protesting civilians on February 28, 1947.
But the Taiwanese people courageously persisted in demanding their political rights. They were supported by elements within the American government and influential members of the media, especially after Washington broke diplomatic and defense ties with Taipei in 1978.
Recognizing that Taiwan's future depended on the friendship of the American people and the support of the U.S. Congress, the KMT authorities resolved to forge the bonds of shared democratic values. In 1987, Chiang Ching-kuo, head of the government and son of Generalissimo Chiang, announced the end of martial law and lifted the ban on political opposition.
Over the next decade, as China regressed into brutal repression, Taiwan moved methodically to open the political system to multi-party competition at the local, then the provincial, levels, culminating in Taiwan's first democratic presidential election in 1996. In 2000, the KMT finally lost its six-decades hold on political power through the decision of the voters, the risk that Chiang Ching-kuo willingly took in 1987.
But in true democratic fashion, Taiwan's voters returned his party to office in 2008 and again in 2012. No one died in any of those transfers of political power - which need not flow only from the barrel of a gun as Mao Zedong instructed. With their penchant for five-year plans, surely China's rulers can manage the same phased peaceful progression to vigorous democratic competition for the right to govern.
Without vision since childhood, Chen Guangcheng has never been a "normal" person in that sense. But he has long had a vision for China - that it simply become a normal country. And he has "seen" the remarkable evolution in a Chinese society 100 miles across the Taiwan Strait.
Wen Jiabao professes to share a similar vision. The Chinese people will have reason to rejoice if Hu Jintao, China's present president, and Xi Jinping, his designated successor, can muster the courage to bring that vision to reality and reverse the tragic legacy of Tiananmen for this generation of Chinese.
