Government, Opposition Agree on Taiwan Reforms : Democracy: The ‘peaceful revolution’ calls for a popular vote for president and an end to one-party rule.

The Taiwan government and opposition defused a constitutional crisis Wednesday and agreed on democratic reforms, including a popular vote for president to end four decades of one-party rule.

An opposition leader called the decision a “peaceful revolution.”

A historic weeklong National Affairs Conference that concluded Wednesday agreed to give more power to native Taiwanese, dominated by the ruling Nationalist Party that retreated to this island from mainland China in 1949.

President Lee Teng-hui called the meeting after student protests in March demanded the scrapping of the system that has preserved the Nationalists’ lock on power.

Lee told the delegates in a closing speech that he would support the recommendations by the 140 delegates, including 80 members of the ruling party and 16 representatives from the Democratic Progressive Party. Independent academics and politicians accounted for the remaining seats.

“This is the time to act,” Lee said.

Many delegates proposed popular presidential elections when Lee’s term ends in 1996, but some supported an earlier vote.

“We have just had a peaceful revolution to gain democracy,” said Chang Chung-hung, secretary-general of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party. “We can now organize a new government governed by law rather than by a few people.”

Convention delegates also supported direct election of the mayors of Taiwan’s two largest cities, Taipei and Kaohsiung, who now are appointed by the government.

And delegates ratified a Nationalist proposal to retire by 1991 all 800 elderly members of the lawmaking Legislative Yuan and electoral college from the mainland.

A task force of representatives from the major parties will settle remaining differences on the democratic reforms, officials said.

One unresolved issue is whether the electoral college should be abolished, as the opposition proposes, or transformed into a symbolic institution that would reflect the popular vote but still reserve seats for deputies purportedly representing mainland China.

The debate focused on what to do with the 1947 constitution, enacted in China by the Nationalist government two years before it lost a civil war to the Communists and retreated to Taiwan, now home to 20 million people.

The Nationalists have since used the constitution as the legal basis for their political power.

Claiming to still be the legitimate government of all China, the Nationalists have not allowed native Taiwanese, who make up 85% of the population, to vote for a majority of seats in the legislature and electoral college. Instead, the party froze in lawmakers elected on the Chinese mainland more than four decades ago.