Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The second reason the protests were so surprising is more subtle and important. Taiwan has been in turmoil for a long time, and particularly in the past five years, about whether or not it is China. The “one China” policy is the most pressing political issue of the day: Will Taiwan at some point be reunited with the mainland—by force or otherwise—or will it eventually declare independence? The official stance of mainland Communists and Taiwan’s KMT is that Taiwan is a province of China; both Taipei and Beijing claim to be valid rulers of China. To the casual Western observer, the situation seems ludicrous. Taiwan has a separate economy, political system, and educational system; citizens carry Taiwanese passports. But Chinese nationalism is deep-seated. Some Taiwanese like to feel that they are part of a great nation and not, as one essayist wrote, “citizens of another piddling Southeast Asian provincial hole-in-the-wall country.” To many Taiwanese with close ties to the mainland, declaring independence would be like cutting off their own arms.

Not that the mainland will countenance independence. Since President Lee Teng-hui of Taiwan visited the United States in June to deliver a speech at Cornell, China has conducted ever-grander “standard military exercises” on the shores opposite Taiwan and in the sea off the island’s northern coast. So Taiwan, under constant threat from the mainland, must toady both across the strait and to the West. That the United States withdrew its ambassador in 1978 still provokes rage. There’s Taiwan—a peaceful democracy that the United States doesn’t recognize because we do recognize another country with a terrible human rights record, with which we do less than half as much trade, and which snubs us in its foreign and domestic policies.

Taiwan’s identity struggle fed the Palace protests. During the seventieth-anniversary celebrations, I encountered more people in Taipei art circles who wanted to disavow the Palace than who praised it. Though the Palace has always attracted tourists, most locals have avoided it—because of its forbidding air, because Taiwan has long been indifferent to art, and because the museum is, according to many Taiwan intellectuals, “alienatingly Chinese.”

A powerful ethnic tension exists within Taiwan today between the “mainlanders” (also called the “1949ers”), who came over with Chiang and their progeny, about 20 percent of the population, and the “Taiwanese,” whose forebears settled there earlier. This ethnic tension is perplexing inasmuch as both groups are Han Chinese, all tracing their roots back to the mainland; the indigenous aboriginal population is tiny. But Chiang’s forces arrived with the air of conquerors, and from 1949 until the end of the brutal “Chiang dynasty” in 1987, the mainlanders of the KMT ruled, and the ethnically Taiwanese, despite controlling much land and wealth, were treated as an underclass.

Chiang’s government, still claiming to rule mainland China, and filling its legislature with representatives from every mainland district, was corrupt. But over the past nine years, the country has transformed itself with remarkable fluidity into a functional democracy with a highly educated population (the literacy rate is more than 90 percent, which in a character-written language is astonishing), enormous national wealth (including one of the largest per capita cash reserves in the world), and open elections. The legislature no longer professes to represent all of China.

“The Palace Museum is a nice place, but it’s too Chinese and insufficiently Taiwanese,” said Chen Shih-meng, deputy mayor of Taipei and former secretary general of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The DPP, one of two major opposition parties, stands overtly for independence. “Whether Chiang Kai-shek took that material rightfully or wrongfully, I don’t know, but we need a Taiwanese place to complement the Palace Museum. We deserve to understand ourselves as Taiwanese. I was taught that I was a part of a Chinese culture to which I never truly belonged. We must raise the consciousness of our next generation. We must help them toward cultural freedom from the mainland.” Then, as is typical given the tense politics of Taiwan, Chen fused the topic at hand with the more essential matter of independence: “The leadership here says that to avoid irritating the mainland, they must speak with creative vagueness. This vagueness, meant to confuse Beijing, confuses the people of Taiwan more than it does the enemy. If China uses military force, we will counterattack. We could destroy their economic zones incredibly fast. We will not win by pitching threats against Chinese military experts, but if we use our military capacities to sow fear among the economists, we can divide that leadership to triumph. We must make our plans clear to the mainland. Developing a native cultural awareness is a part of this policy. The Palace Museum does not enable such objectives.”