ABSTRACT
This chapter talks about Taiwan's democratization and measures the extent to which the PRC's current trajectory resembles Taiwan's development at comparable moments in its history. It recognizes an important caveat in the study of democratization: while it is possible to separate conceptually the influences of various factors, in practice, those factors interact to drive political change. Lipset argued that it is not economic growth alone, but development or modernization that predicts successful democratization. O'Donnell and Schmitter argue that once an authoritarian regime begins to liberalize, its opponents typically move swiftly into the newly-available public space. Other scholars have elaborated and qualified society's contribution to democratization. In fact, Taiwan stands to play an outsized role in the mainland's political development because many PRC citizens including Chen Guangcheng view Taiwan as a uniquely meaningful point of reference for then-own aspirations.
