From authoritarian policing to democratic policing: a case study of Taiwan Liqun Cao a,b *, Lanying Huang c and Ivan Sun d a Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, ON, Canada; ueensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia; Graduate School of b c Criminology, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan; Department of Sociology and d Delaware, Newark, DE, USA (Received 21 September 2014; accepted 15 January 2015) The literature of democratic policing has neglected the case study of unique geopolitical situation. This study examines Taiwan, one of the few countries that has experienced a relatively peaceful transition from authoritarian policing to democratic policing. While the push from the dangwai movement was necessary, democratisation could not be so peaceful without benign concession from ex-president Chiang Ching-Kuo and his hand-picked successor Li Denghui. The article then contrasts the essential characteristics of democratic policing with these of authoritarian policing before the lifting of martial law in 1987. We contend that to endure democracy, the police must accept and embody democratic values in their practices. The difficulties to democratic reforms come from both despotic past and jaundiced interpretation of Confucianism. The essay represents a systematic attempt to explore the spread of democratic policing to a post-Confucian society. Keywords: authoritarian policing; democratic policing; post-Confucian culture; Taiwan police Introduction Although it is relatively rare that the police would lead a coup, it could happen. A recent example of police uprising took place in Ecuador in 2010 when police officers held the country’ s president captive for hours (Romero 2010), demonstrating the power and danger of this social control institution. Scholars have argued that democratic policing is an essential element to any successful emerging democracy in seeking a delicate balance between the concern about domestic security and the protection of human rights (Bayley 2005, Manning 2010, Cao et al. 2014a). Nonetheless, the vital role of the police in political development towards democracy has been largely ignored in the literature and the question on why the police could maintain its neutrality during such transition has not been satisfactorily answered. To fill the knowledge void left by previous research, this study focuses on Taiwan as the country experienced a relatively peaceful transition from an authoritarian regime to a democracy from 1986 to 2000 during which the police served as a facilitator, rather than an inhibitor, of the process. It is theoretically relevant and practically interesting to understand the police behaviour in a non-Western society, which is clearly understudied. *Corresponding author. Email: liqun.cao@uoit.ca © 2015 Taylor & Francis Q Criminal Justice, University of This article was originally published with errors. This version has been amended. Please see Corrigendum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2015.1122994). Policing and Society , 2016 Vol. 26, No. 6, 642–658, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2015.1009370