Taiwan: a promise wrapped in a dilemma

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Pounding rain. A typhoon had moved through the western Pacific, dumping gully-washer sheets of water onto the streets of this city, and on thousands of people sitting under tarps, shouting for the resignation of their president.

I am in the Jiufen Old Street Precinct station of the Taiwanese national police, a minor passport matter of a colleague's lost documents; not to worry, just these forms to fill out in triplicate. The precinct captain, brush cut, crisp uniform shirt, is pouring endless cups of tea through the ritual of a clay teakettle and steaming vapor. A man in street clothes comes in, sits down and starts to hand around paper-thin sheets of a kind of fish-impregnated seaweed. We all eat some. I walk outside the precinct house to throw up, but the moment passes and instead I sit under the foliage in a tropical twilight, waiting for a policeman to answer questions, insistently flashing in Mandarin on a monitor screen, about a missing passport.

I am anxious to get back to the city and its demonstrations of voter anger. The rain has passed, leaving a sauna through which 2.5 million people now wade on their way home from work and school. The streets are both fresh from the rain and not fresh, as only Asian streets can be, here on the blue edge of the Pacific, 4,000 miles from Seattle — what seems a million starlit miles from home.

In Taiwan's rough-and-tumble democracy, some members of the ruling Democratic Pro-gressive Party have turned on their elected leader to demand his resignation over corruption charges within his immediate family. President Chen Shui-bian can't be indicted while in office and up to now few thought he would resign. But his wife has been indicted and the place is in political chaos.

"The problem with the DPP," says Antonio Chiang, a 61-year-old legend among Taiwanese journalists, "is not corruption, but that they can't govern."

Such are the violin strings of democracy — all have to be in tune for the song to work. Noted China scholar Richard C. Bush of the Brookings Institution said in a later telephone interview that it's clear democracy has been embedded in Taiwan, but it is unclear how good that democracy will be.

"Political scientists call it the failure of democratic consolidation. The problem is all over Eastern Europe and other parts of Asia. How can a democracy hold on when it is so new?" Bush said.

A Russian is sitting next to me over tea at the Grand Hotel, the exotic wooden structure that perpetually evokes the era of Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek. The Russian endlessly asks the same question, "Do the majority of Taiwanese consider themselves Chinese first?"

It turns out to be a question almost unanswerable, even though it goes straight to the marrow of local politics. Who are these people and what is Taiwan? During a half-century of Japanese colonial rule, original, native Taiwanese in the deep forests were finally dissuaded from headhunting. That came to an end roughly in the 1920s.

Parts of Taiwan retain that misty remoteness. After the Japanese came the mainland Chinese. A tropical island, this year with a glut of bananas from its lush plantations, with mountain ranges covered in shiny, green bamboo — all with 23 million people, but in a globalized world — who are they?

"I am Taiwanese, my family has been here for more than 200 years," Antonio Chiang says. "Most young people think of themselves as Taiwanese. How could they not? They have only the slightest connection to the mainland."

On Kinmen Island, I look through a slit in a former gun bunker to China itself, across the water but easily within sight and artillery range. It was here 40 years ago that 80,000 shells bombarded these small outposts, called Quemoy and Matsu in the historic years of the Cold War. I stood at this exact spot in the bunker 22 years ago, guided here by National Chinese army officers on an island under military rule and riddled with tunnels and secret passageways.

The gardens of Kinmen now are lovely, with long paths across the former battlefield. Tourists are welcomed here to shrines commemorating the most recent Chinese civil war. This is where Chinese truly fought Chinese, and began the independent island of Taiwan. Piles of rusted Soviet shells can be found in harrowed fields. A knife maker has made himself renowned by hammering the discarded artillery shells — mountains of them — into kitchen utensils.

It seems that nothing can keep these people down. Maestro Wu, as he calls himself, is lanky as a Tennessean and hammers out a fresh knife blade in front of my eyes, forged from Soviet steel made into an artillery round. He sells his knives all over the world by turning war's litter into a novelty.

Little tourist nodes are breaking out in the villages of Kinmen. New candy shops, cool in the midday sun and offering free sips of sweet vinegar, are open for the tour buses. I get talked into sampling candy made from the same seaweed paper passed out at the police station.

The economic rise of Taiwan preceded the rise of mercantile China in the past century, but now the two are cellphone buddies, distanced by politics and grumpy about the other's existence but so heavily cross-invested they eat from the same rice bowl. Just 20 years ago, China was a struggling rural outpost and Taiwan was one of the Little Dragons, with growth more than 10 percent a year and numerous financial ties to the West. Now, the enormity of the Chinese economy swallows everything.

Unofficial estimates put the number of Taiwanese living in the People's Republic of China at 1 million, managing perhaps $60 billion to $100 billion in direct investment in the mainland's economy.

Wal-Mart, for example, reportedly has the winning bid of $1 billion on a chain of stores in China — but those stores are owned by Taiwanese. Wal-Mart Corp. declined to comment on the report.

"We think of China as our factory," Chiang said. "We have money, but no territory," he continued. "We are not far enough away, and at the same time too close. If Taiwan were farther away from China, we would be independent by now. If we were closer, like Hong Kong, we would be part of China again."

"Maybe it is all just dust in the wind," said Amber Chang, editor in chief of the English-language Taipei Times.

Chang is speaking of Taiwan's relentless and fruitless attempts to join the United Nations, or the World Health Organization, or obtain a free-trade agreement with the U.S. "Future generations may see this independence as silly, but we have to keep trying, no matter the outcome."

Chang, who is European-educated and worked on a Ph.D. in New Zealand, seems the perfect, modern Taiwanese. She is a member of a small ethnic group within the Chinese people — Hakka — known for their hard work and a bit of a victim's phobia about perceived discrimination from other Chinese. She runs the best English-language daily in Taipei, despite fierce competition and the endless problem of trying to find and keep native English-speaking editors.

Chang says she has the perfect job creating a daily Asian newspaper for a Western audience. She also could sit in any American corporation or newsroom and rise to the top. She is part of the Westernization of Taiwan — the most Western of the Eastern countries.

Not far from Chang's offices of marble and glass, Taipei 101 beckons with the world's fastest elevators (rising at 38 mph) to the top of the world's tallest building, 101 stories and 1,671 feet. Taipei 101 is the epitome of Taiwanese hard work, industry, imagination and democracy. To me, it is also a sign of the permanence of Taiwan on the Chinese landscape. A people believing they will someday move back to the mainland do not build the world's tallest building to leave behind.

"It's not the prettiest city, or the grandest," a European says from the observation deck on the 89th floor of 101. But the city is both energetic and tawdry, a brain factory and a lever for huge investments across Asia, and home to a sometimes bristling, always busy people.

"Silicon Island" is another slogan the Taiwanese use, and they're not kidding. New science and research parks are positioned up and down the western coast. At the center of raw politics, smart businesses and sharp elbows, Taipei has become, in fewer than 20 years, one of the economic capitals of Asia.

Taipei 101 is its final exclamation point. The jade-green tower looks both modern and old Chinese, too. It glistens with marble and coffee shops and ice cream parlors, has room for 10,000 office workers, and seven floors of the Taiwan Stock Exchange. Yet, it sometimes disappears entirely from view in the smog that often engulfs the city. Somehow, the place remains elusive in its own tropical mist. Is this China or Houston, is this the beginning of a new country or the last of the old?

In a poignant conclusion to "Untying the Knot," his political history of modern Taiwan, Richard C. Bush sums up the promise and dilemma of Taiwan:

"For a variety of reasons, the people of Taiwan long ago became, in a sense, wards of the United States. Their complex history and aspirations, their security, and their government's penetration of the U.S. political system became a part of U.S. foreign policy. And although popular Taiwan wishes get refracted through the priorities of officials and politicians, at the end of the day it is to the people of the island that the United States bears a responsibility."

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com