Chicken-beheading rituals have come to be associated with personal honesty in Taiwanese society and become more of a symbol of integrity than an actuality in contemporary Taiwan.
Chicken-beheading rituals have historical roots in the legal traditions of China's Fujian Province, where over 70% of Taiwanese citizens can trace their ancestry.
[1] In feudal Fujianese society, individuals who were suspected of theft were taken before images of judges and forced to proclaim an oath of innocence.
[6] Finally the person will make a contingent curse upon themselves, promising that some kind of grave misfortune will happen to them or their families if they lied in their oath.
She was distraught and so forced Wang to conduct a chicken-beheading ritual with her at the temple of the city god in Dongshan to determine who was telling the truth.
[8] Twenty days after proclaiming his oath of innocence, Wang was seen babbling and maniacally running through the streets, saying that he would be happy to give 100 yuan to Chen's widow to resolve the matter.
He made an oath proclaiming that he was a man of integrity and innocent of any wrongdoing in one of Taiwan's most renowned temples, the Zhenlan Gong.
[12] This asservation served to bolster his political capital as the dramatic display made his constituents believe that he was indeed an honest and good man.
When James Soong was accused of embezzling funds from his own Kuomintang (KMT) Party, he was depicted performing a chicken-beheading ritual to prove his innocence in a cartoon by the Liberty Times.