PJ Vogt

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Welcome back to the show.

The story of how Taiwan became a democracy is long and gradual.

We're gonna watch it in Fast Forward.

Essentially, at the beginning of our montage, you have nationalists from China running Taiwan, but as the decades pass and they fail to take back their mainland, what will happen is they will get old, and they will die, and they will have to be replaced.

And the nationalists can't go to mainland China and go get more colonial rulers.

That's the country they're in exile from.

So over time, the nationalists start letting the Taiwanese people run for office.

Low-level office at first, but the democracy just keeps going with help from activists, with help from time, from the bottom up.

And by the 1990s, Taiwan has a very different government from mainland China.

Two states, siblings separated by a schism, growing more and more different as the years pass.

Sometimes you could watch the same idea take hold in China and Taiwan, but expressed in crucially different ways.

For instance, in China in the 1950s, Mao enacts land reform.