‘Yet I wish to state in this place, though disclaiming the use of vain or boastful words, that the end is not yet — that the monarchists shall yet weep and gnash their teeth, and that one of these days, not too remote, the tyrant of Pekin will hurry from the country quite as ignominiously as ever a culprit left his former haunts!’ 

— Sun Yat-sen, writing in The New York Sun, December 7, 1913

That observation by the father of Chinese democracy, Sun Yat-sen, writing in the Sun, is uncannily apt in light of the vote to be held on Saturday on Taiwan for the post that Sun Yat-sen first held — the presidency of the Republic of China. Sun’s insight, at a time of tumult on the mainland, explains, too, why today’s tyrant at Beijing, Xi Jinping, appears so agitated about the election. Free China’s vote for its own leader puts Xi’s tyranny in sharp relief.

No wonder that Mr. Xi used his new year address “to sound a warning to Taiwan’s voters,” as the Financial Times described it. In 2024 — the 75th year since Mao’s communists won China’s civil war — “China will surely be reunified,” Mr. Xi threatened. Such talk of bringing Taiwan under the communist mainland’s boot is cutting no ice with the island democracy’s 23 million citizens, though, as our Donald Kirk reports. 

They “see themselves as a de facto nation and fear Communist China absorbing them,” Mr. Kirk writes. Hence the lead in polls for the top pro-independence candidate, Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s vice president. Mr. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party has incurred Mr. Xi’s wrath “because it refuses to define the country as part of China,” the FT says. A mainland official says that Beijing expects Taiwan to “make the right choice between ‘peace and war.’” 

The ham-fisted threats by Mr. Xi and his comrades, though, appear to be intensifying, not diminishing, Taiwan’s sense of itself as an independent nation. This failure to comprehend the democratic mindset of Taiwan’s voters is no surprise. Mr. Xi is a product of a totalitarian party and has never faced a free election. Sun Yat-sen, by contrast, backed “government by the people, of the people, and for the people,” explaining that “I believe in the Chinese people.”

That spirit of liberty, first kindled by Sun on the mainland, then transplanted to Taiwan by Sun’s successor, Chiang Kai-shek, and his heirs as presidents of Free China, clearly rankles Mr. Xi. Yet this is just what Chiang had in mind when he described Taiwan as a “citadel of freedom.” A thriving Chinese democracy, just some 100 miles off the coast of the mainland, puts to shame Mr. Xi’s pretensions of being a legitimate leader of all Chinese people.

Chiang urged Taiwan to remember “the sacred task” of “recovering the mainland.” That ambition has proved daunting, even as Free China’s constitution until 1991 provided for the lost provinces on the mainland to hold seats in the freely elected Legislative Yuan. It is not by force of arms, though, that Taiwan can help reunify China today. Rather, it is the power of Sun’s idea — democratic Republican self-rule — that most threatens Mr. Xi and his tyranny.

The cause of Chinese democracy, though, has lacked for friends in America’s press for years. When Chiang died in 1975, the New York Times called his hopes of restoring Sun’s free republic on the mainland “a monumental delusion.” The Times saw Chiang’s death as a win for “mutual accommodation among ideological opponents” — in short, appeasing Beijing. Tell that to the people of Hong Kong. The only democracy in China is on Taiwan. 

In the Sun in 1913, Sun Yat-sen conceded his forecasts of a return to democracy at Beijing were “brave statements” for “a penniless exile to make.” China’s fledgling republic, after all, faced setbacks even then. Yet, he asked, “does not the world remember that only yesterday the people of China overthrew the old dynasty” with the “power of the command, ‘Get Out!’?” That danger, Sun said, stems from failing to “heed the voice of the people,” whom Mr. Xi fears.

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Correction: Lai Ching-te is the vice president of Taiwan. An earlier version misstated his name.