Recent studies of authoritarianism have paid attention not only to the existence of nominally democratic institutions, but also to what political elites say within these institutions. Even the most notorious dictators speak democracy, and authoritarian elites tend to use democracy as an instrument to strengthen the legitimacy of the regime. The opposition, by contrast, might promote democracy in order to push forward regime changes. This research probes the concept of democracy in the interpellations made by the members of parliament from different groups during the authoritarian era (1970-1992). Specifically, I study four groups of the MPs, including those elected from the Mainland China, local Taiwanese elites leaning toward the government, the opposition soft-liners and the opposition hard-liners. I train a word embedding using a corpus where “democracy” appears for each group-year and examine what words are semantically close to democracy for each group-year. Additionally, I perform semantic network analyses to further investigate the connections of words to democracy across groups and time. For the Mainland-elected MPs, democracy might be more connected to Sun Yat-Sen’s philosophy and the antagonism toward the communists, while it might be more associated to Taiwan’s social and economic developments for the local Taiwanese elites. Meanwhile, democracy might be more associated with human rights, regime changes and Taiwan independence for the opposition. This research contributes to the literature on regime transition by empirically examining the rhetoric of democracy shown in a nominally-democratic parliament. The findings also address long-lasting controversies over what politicians mean by democracy.