A City Transformed Amid Independence Notions

Eric Ellis, Taipei

03/12/1996

CIVIC pride is not usually a measure of independence aspirations, except in Taipei.

It is arguably one of the world's ugliest capital, an impermanent, higgledy-piggledy conglomeration of rampant development with little or no planning controls.

Business people have usually groaned when compelled to go to the Taiwanese capital, stuck for hours in traffic that rivals Bangkok for its gridlocks, and breathing its lead-laden air. Taipei is not a pleasant place.

Or rather, was not a pleasant place. Taipei hasn't suddenly become Paris but a transformation has come over the city, and Taiwan generally, in the years since President Lee Teng-hui abandoned his Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party's claim to be the rightful ruler of all China.

With that political charade out of the way, Taipei suddenly became permanent, no longer a temporary stop for the Kuomintang until it once again conquered the mainland after being deposed in 1949 by Mao Zedong's communists.

Money was spent on the environment, an underground railway, traffic lights and parks. Steelworks were no longer built in residential areas. Industrial parks were established. The city grew up as well as out and the change was mirrored in Taiwan's half-dozen other large and equally ugly cities.

This change also coincided with President Lee's simultaneous embrace of democratic reforms, and with it a flowering of new and radical ideas, such as independence.

Taiwan's is also one of the world's youngest societies. Some 60 per cent of the population are under the age of 30 and 90 per cent were born in Taiwan. They are Taiwanese first and Chinese a distant second.

To them, the 1949 mainland exodus is a fairy tale their grandparents get misty eyed about. China has very little relevance, apart from being a potential market for the goods they and their booming factories make.

Since 1986, when martial law was lifted by then President Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek, millions of Taiwanese have visited the mainland ... and hurried back. To Taiwan's youth, the mainland is as poor, backward and underprivileged as Taiwan is modern, gleaming and available.

Corporate Taiwan now has more than $US20 billion ($26 billion) invested on the mainland, mostly in neighbouring Fujian Province and around Shanghai but few Taiwanese actually want to live there.

It is a foreign country that just happens to speak a similar language.

But even in language and culture - two things communist rhetoric clings on to - the two sides are getting further apart.

The Beijing regime was not only incensed by President Lee's unofficial visit to the US last June, it was outraged that when Lee spoke at semi-official gatherings, he did so symbolically in the Taiwanese dialect and not Mandarin.

Singapore statesman Lee Kuan Yew said it was that that convinced Beijing's leaders of the current course of military intimidation they are taking, that made them convinced Lee has a hidden independence agenda.

Lee, who seeks election on March 23 to become history's first freely elected leader of a Chinese State, is hated by Beijing.

He is a Christian, where Beijing is officially agnostic; he was born in 1923 in the then Japanese colony of Taiwan and considers himself Taiwanese, where other Nationalist leaders were mainland-born Chinese.

While he speaks Mandarin, Taiwanese and English, the language he is said to be most comfortable in is Japanese, and he studied at Japan's prestigious Kyoto Imperial University. His brother was a soldier in the Japanese Imperial Army and Lee has occasionally said he sometimes feels Japanese, statements which don't wash in Beijing which still demonises Japan and its wartime Nanjing massacre.

Lee has cleverly played the Beijing leaders, going far enough to further Taiwan's notional independence but pulling back when appropriate, or dangerous.

At the same time, he has made it very difficult, and embarrassing, for the world to ignore Taiwan, which has not only transformed itself democratically but is an arch-free trader in line with international trade conventions such as the WTO parameters. Taiwa is also rich, holding the world's second highest foreign reserves ($US90 billion) after Japan, although it is fast eating into them to support Taipei's missile-spooked stock and currency markets.

Lee plays on Beijing's paranoia that the alternative to Lee, the Democratic Progressive Party, which can count on about 30-40 per cent of the vote in opinion polls, is making good ground on the ruling KMT.

The DPP has staked its platform on independence for Taiwan.

Beijing also detests his close links with US politicians on both sides of Capitol Hill, and he is said to have played golf with both Bill Clinton and George Bush, unofficially of course. While the US officially recognises Beijing as the only China and the two have a massive economic interest in each other, Clinton this week authorised the stationing near Taiwain of the USS Independence. The ship's name shouts out loudly in a region where symbols matter often more than words.