At the end of 1977, Taiwan held a five-in-one election for public offices (county mayors; county and city councilors; Taiwan provincial councilors; Taipei city councilors; and urban and rural village mayors). One of the candidates for Taoyuan County mayor was Ou Hsian-yu, who had been in the Ministry of Judicial Administration Investigation Bureau and was nominated by the Kuomintang (National People's Party, KMT). Another candidate was Hsu Hsin-liang, who announced his candidacy after leaving the KMT. Hsu Hsin-liang had joined the KMT when he was in college. He had once been a local Taiwanese star cultivated by the KMT, but after going to study in the UK and coming into contact with leftist theories, he gradually changed his political stance. In 1973, Hsu Hsin-liang was elected to the Taiwan Provincial Assembly. After that point, he often refused to implement KMT policies, and even publicly criticized many proposals. In 1977, he published the book "Voices of the Wind and Rain", in which he severely criticized the KMT and described being suppressed by other party members. When he decided to run for Taoyuan County mayor, the KMT refused the nomination on the grounds of "poor party discipline assessment records", so Hsu Hsin-liang left the party to run for election.

Hsu Hsin-liang received a lot of support from the public at the time, including many college students and graduate students. On November 19th, the day of the election, there was a fraud incident at the No. 213 polling station at Zhongli Elementary School. A member of the public reported that a poll worker, Fan-chiang Hsin-lin, pressed his thumb onto an ink pad and invalidated votes for Hsu Hsin-liang. However, when the Zhongli police precint received the report of the voting fraud incident, they turned a blind eye. An angry crowd gathered, then surrounded and burned the police station to the ground. The police fired tear gas and guns, which unfortunately killed Chiang Wen-kuo, a student at National Central University, and another young man named Chang Chih-p'ing. It wasn't until the next morning that the crowd gradually began to disperse.

In the end, the Taoyuan County polling station re-counted all the votes. Hsu Hsin-liang defeated Ou Hsian-yu by 100,000 votes and was successfully elected as the Taoyuan County Mayor. The Zhongli Incident was the first time that Taiwanese people had spontaneously and on a large scale taken to the streets to protest election fraud. This is regarded as the starting point of Taiwan's democracy; it also set the stage for the Formosa Incident two years later, and social movements in Taiwan in the 1980s.

References: [關鍵評論 ("The News Lens")(Chinese)] (https://www.thenewslens.com/article/83699); [報導者("The Reporter")(Chinese)] (https://www.twreporter.org/a/zhongli-incident-40-years); [大公報("Ta Kung Pao")(Chinese)] (http://news.takungpao.com/taiwan/shizheng/2013-12/2131361.html)