This paper attempts to identify and explain factors impeding rural people's participation in rural development planning in Taiwan. AII these factors are divided into two categories, the individual's external factors and internal factors. Under each category more specific factors have been identified and explained.In the final part of the paper, strategies for releasing the impeding factors have been proposed. In order to correspond two major categories of the impeding factors, effective strategies are also proposed as two major aspects, the government effort strategy and the individual's self-improvement strategy. Available data for the study are mainly collected through interviewing 150 sample rural residents in five different villages of Taiwan.