Evolving Taiwan Poses Challenge to Beijing

On the night of June 3, 1989, Michael Tseng was glued to his television set as China's army crushed a student-led democracy movement around Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Tseng remembers experiencing a deep sense of belonging throughout the two-month protest in China.

"I thought, `These are my people,' " said the 45-year-old chairman of a small business in Taipei. "They're my flesh and blood."

This summer, floods ravaged large swaths of China, leaving millions homeless and thousands dead. Tseng, whose parents were born in Hubei, one of the devastated provinces, channel-surfed past the news. "It was sad, but I'm also sad when there's a flood in Bangladesh," he said. "I don't look at China in the same way anymore."

As Taiwan approaches its ninth major election Saturday as a multi-party democracy, this island of 21 million people is forging a new and separate identity from the massive nation 100 miles to its west. President Lee Teng-hui has coined the term "new Taiwan person" to describe the changing face of the island's citizens. For Beijing, this "person" presents an enormous challenge to its mission of unifying with Taiwan.

China's Nationalist government fled to Taiwan in 1949 after it lost a civil war to the Communists. From that point, the Nationalists maintained a dream that they would return one day to reconquer China. In the 1980s, after the deaths of Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, the Nationalists abandoned that dream. Ties between the two sides improved.

Today, more than 200,000 Taiwanese live in China. This island's firms have invested more than $30 billion in 45,000 enterprises in China, and China is Taiwan's biggest export market after the United States.

But years of increased familiarity and close trade ties actually have magnified Taiwan's alienation from China -- where the political system, while more liberal than before, still brooks no challenge to the rule of the Communist Party. This island buzzed with talk about unification in the 1980s; it is unheard today.

Nelson Chang, 46, is the scion of a prominent family of businessmen hailing from Zhejiang Province along China's central coast. He professes a deep attachment to Chinese culture.

"When I first went back to the mainland to visit my grandparents' graves, I was very, very excited," said Chang, the Princeton-educated president of a Taiwanese cement company that invests in China. "But ask me now if I want to live in my home town, and the answer is no. . . . If I had a choice to live under the Beijing regime or the U.S., I'd choose the U.S. I like the freedom I have, and I don't want to lose it."

Beijing's military exercises off the coast of Taiwan in 1996 and the lobbing of several missiles over Taiwanese territory during the island's first direct presidential elections further alienated Taiwan from China. China's continued insistence that it will invade Taiwan if the island declares independence has not helped either.

The main catalyst of Taiwan's separation from China has been 12 years of a multi-party system that has created one of Asia's most dynamic democracies. That is at the core of Taiwan's new identity and the increasing pride people here have in their unique electoral process -- a combination of Tammany Hall-style sleaze, Fourth of July pageantry and party politics that would make any Democrat or Republican proud.

Interviews throughout this island -- with businessmen, high school students, artists and politicians -- before the vote reveal a vibrant culture that is no longer as desperate to define itself as it was in the early days of Taiwan's democracy.

Others added that despite election rhetoric to the contrary, Taiwan also has made great strides in the past 10 years in bridging the great divide between the 15 percent of its population comprising families that originated in China and fled to this island after the Communists' victory and the majority, whose ancestors lived here before.

Ten years ago, the choices were stark for Taiwan's people -- you were either a Chinese and favored unification with Beijing or a Taiwanese and backed independence. Today, Taiwan's people appear comfortable with being Chinese and Taiwanese. And that duality is bad news for Beijing.

Yang Cheng-yen, 31, is a playwright, the author of seven experimental works in the 1990s and part of a circle of young Taiwanese artists that pushed for the creation of a separate Taiwanese culture. Two years ago, she went to New York University to study finance. When she returned to Taiwan last year, she no longer backed independence for Taiwan. She has joined the ever-expanding political center here.

"In New York, I realized that most of the world was splitting up into smaller and smaller countries, tinier and tinier ethnic groups," she said. "Besides, Taiwan doesn't need to declare independence. It already has it."

In Saturday's elections, voters will choose legislators, county chiefs and two mayors. The mayor's race in Taipei between incumbent Chen Shui-bian, a gritty opposition party leader, and Ma Ying-jeou, a dashing young star of the Nationalist Party, is the most prominent contest.

Pundits have said the vote is significant because Chen has been an independence activist. Some thinkers claim that a victory by Chen could cause instability in East Asia and force a change in U.S. policy toward Taiwan because it would signify that Taiwan's voters have adopted a devil-may-care attitude toward China's threats to invade if independence is declared. If Chen wins, they say, he is poised to run for president in 2000.

Ma, born in Hong Kong to a family that had fled China, is said to represent a wing of the Nationalist Party that favors closer ties to China. A victory by Ma, who studied law at Harvard University and served as the justice minister in the past government, means that Taiwan has embraced stability, some analysts say.

The problem with the pundits is that they don't take the voters into account. Nor do they heed the changes among Taiwan's political parties.

The formation of a powerful and self-confident center in Taiwan has yanked all of Taiwan's main parties -- Nationalists, with 2 million members and bulging bank accounts; the Democratic Progressive Party, with 200,000 members and once-radical rhetoric; and the smaller New Party, which used to advocate early unification -- into the political center.

"After years of debate in Taiwan, there's a middle ground consensus on our mainland policy," said Su Chi, a close aide to President Lee and a respected expert on Chinese policy. "In this campaign, nobody is standing for peaceful unification. And nobody serious dares to call for independence."

Indeed, during his four years at the helm of Taipei, Chen has radically altered his image from a troublemaking activist to someone who has done a credible job of improving the capital's traffic snarls. A few years ago, Chen accused Koo Chen-fu, Taiwan's chief negotiator with China, of being a traitor to Taiwan. But in November, when Koo returned from Beijing after the first talks in three years between the two sides, Chen was lavish in his praise.

The Nationalists have changed as well, and Koo's trip underscored this transformation. The 82-year-old tycoon told Chinese interlocutors two things that left the Communists dismayed: First, Taiwan will contemplate unification with China when China begins democratizing. And second, Taiwan will discuss unification with China only if China treats Taiwan as an equal.

A recent poll of 18- to 44-year-olds indicated that more than 9 out of 10 people consider their country to be Taiwan and not China. To reinforce this trend, last year elementary school students were taught a new course called "Getting to Know Taiwan" -- the first time Taiwanese history has been taught in Taiwan's schools.