Chiang democratic? Sheesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek#Mass_deaths_un...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Republic_o...:

Following the ROC government's retreat to Taiwan on 7 December 1949, the Temporary Provisions together with martial law made the country an authoritarian one-party state despite the constitution. Democratization began in the 1980s. Martial law was lifted in 1987, and in 1991 the Temporary Provisions were repealed.

ROC has been democratic since the 01990s, but it was an authoritarian dictatorship that killed millions of its own people at the time the Communists drove it out of the mainland (only to exceed its atrocities with their own) and for decades afterwards.

The KMT have an awful track record as being horrifically authoritarian.

OP isn’t wrong though contemporary Taiwan is a model democracy in a region where there are few.

I think pinning Taiwan as "last bastion" of some democracy that existed before is incorrect as any honest history of the KMT can see.

Even dishonest histories of the KMT are rarely so dishonest as to claim the ROC was democratically governed, however much they try to whitewash the mass killings. Disinformation has to be plausible to be effective.

All this arguing about what the KMT did and the relationship going back to the ROC doesn't matter. Today Taiwan is a democracy, is no threat to anyone, and deserves every right of self-determination. Democracies should work together to collectively protect each other from the authoritarian countries that want to take them over and destroy their democracies.

"going back to the ROC"? It sounds like you aren't aware that the ROC still exists; it governs Taiwan. Some of the things you say are true but it seems clear that this is purely by coincidence, not a result of any knowledge you might have of the topic.