A post earlier this week commemorates what Politics from Taiwan blogger David sees as ten years of democracy on the island off China's eastern coast:

“By my reckoning, today marks the 10th anniversary of Taiwan's democracy. On 20th May 1996 Lee Teng-hui gave this speech at his inauguration. The election (two months previously) was the first time that Taiwan's president had been democratically elected. Of course, there was some democracy before this—there had been increasingly democratic elections for the legislature and the national assembly in the years before it, but this marked the final point when Taiwan could finally call itself a democratic country.”