This was the first union that existed independently of the KMT in Taiwan's post-war history (although the KMT retained a minority membership on its committee). Rather than prevailing upon the state to use martial law to smash the union, the management adopted the more cautious approach of buying workers' votes at election times. However, such attempts repeatedly failed and, by 1986, all of the elected leaders were genuine unionists.[1] Another, and, historically, the most important, was the now called "Zhongli incident".