“No matter who wins, or who loses, I envy Taiwan and send best wishes,” said a posting by a writer identified as Menghe Caotang on a Chinese version of Twitter.
Taiwan’s example has raised a prickly question for a leadership that rejects elections as an alien and chaos-prone Western import, said Zhang Ming, a professor of politics at Renmin University in Beijing.
“Why do all the neighboring countries and regions have direct elections but not China?” Zhang said. Taiwan, he added, “shows that Chinese people can handle democracy, although it’s not perfect” and has “vigorously refuted a fallacy that democracy is not suitable for Chinese.”
Unlike previous elections in Taiwan, which have often been marred by violence or extensive cheating, this year’s poll has been far more orderly, although a weekly magazine uncovered evidence of what it described as government spying on the opposition.
Wang, the former Tiananmen student leader who is now 42, believes that the Internet and a rapid expansion in the flow of information through it will eventually allow today’s youth in China to succeed in bringing about change.
“Everyone thinks young Chinese today aren’t interested in politics. This is a myth,” Wang said. “They might feel helpless but they still want change.”
An example to follow
At the end of Wang’s three-hour lecture, mainland students rushed to pose for a souvenir photograph with the man reviled by Beijing as a “counter-revolutionary” agitator.
Public discussion of the Tiananmen Square protest movement and the massacre that ended it on June 4, 1989, is taboo in China.
A 22-year-old electrical engineering student from Fujian province, which lies just over a 100 miles away across the Taiwan Strait, said he’d heard vaguely about Wang as a high school student but didn’t know much about what happened in 1989. He decided to attend Wang’s lecture so that “I can see what a student leader is really like.” China, which has more than 1.3 billion people, can’t jump to democracy in a single bound, he said, but it can “step by step” follow the example of Taiwan, an island with a well-educated and wealthier population of just 23 million.
Before the lecture, Wang joined other Chinese exiles for a seminar.
Li Hengqing, a Tiananmen-generation activist who, like Wang, got thrown in jail after the 1989 military crackdown, said that China, though much bigger than Taiwan, has already started on a path traced by the island nation. Taiwan’s own modern political awakening began, he noted, with a KMT massacre in 1947 and took decades of struggle.
Hong Kong-based publisher Bao Pu, whose father was a senior Communist Party official who was purged and jailed for siding with students in 1989, said Taiwan’s biggest challenge to China is its stability, an order that has been reinforced not undermined by its retreat from authoritarianism. “Sooner or later, Beijing will get the message that it is their system that is unstable,” he said.
Researcher Zhang Jie in Beijing contributed to this report.
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