Changing China

Why Taiwan mentioned China’s missiles

Taiwan and China, once bitter political rivals, jubilantly exchanged gifts after upbeat trade talks this week. But the festive atmosphere faded when Taiwan’s top policymaker Lai Shin-yuan reminded visiting Chinese negotiator Chen Yunlin of an ominous, obvious fact: Taiwan’s public feels “uncomfortable” with China aiming missiles at it. Taiwan accuses China of pointing 1,000 to 1,500 short-range or mid-range missiles in its direction to deter any move toward de jure independence. Taiwan is self-ruled today but China claims it. Missiles, however, weren’t on this week’s can-do agenda. Taiwan’s Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou has said China-Taiwan talks for now should avoid political issues until more mutual trust accumulates through discussion of lighter topics such as trade.

And Lai’s statement did little good on the surface. Taiwan’s Chinese-language China Times newspaper said the Chinese negotiator replied that Beijing is in no hurry to discuss political issues. Another Taiwan paper, the United Daily News, reported that negotiator told Lai the missile issue would take time to solve.

Was the missile remark another gaffe like this? Or was Lai, who has something to prove, rushing ahead several years or decades, assuming that the two sides had already accumulated enough mutual trust?

There’s another explanation. Taiwan’s image-conscious government, often accused of cozying up to China because of the recent trade talks, just wanted to gain points at home by raising a populist issue. Otherwise, one blogger argues, the anti-China opposition party stands to gain. The party has drawn attention to itself by leading tens of thousands to protest against the Chinese negotiator’s Dec. 21-25 visit to Taiwan.

Argues George Tsai, a political scientist at Chinese Cultural University in Taipei: “It’s to convince the public, hey, we can stand up. You are going to see more of this kind of statement. Ma Ying-jeou has been accused too much of leaning toward the other side.”

When I retire – I want to be a ballerina

What does retirement mean to you?

For a group of grandmothers in Taiwan’s Pingtung County, it means fulfilling a childhood dream of becoming ballerinas.

And now the women, most in their 60s, tackle everything from a “battement fondu” to an “arabesque” stance.

Watching them leap across the room is enough to convince anyone life is full of new beginnings – at any stage.

Photo credit: Pichi Chuang Video credit: Ben Tai

Chicks love vegetarians

Want to be sexy? Then don’t eat meat, says Taiwanese star Barbie Hsu.

“Vegetarians make chicks happy” is a new People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaign fronted by Hsu, better known in the Chinese speaking world as “Big S”.

PETA hope the actress, who shot to fame in the hit Taiwanese soap opera “Meteor Garden”, will appeal to younger Chinese.

The beauty and the beast will appear in magazines and on websites in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong over the next few weeks.

What, this old junk?

Before the triangular symbol taught us to recycle, reduce and reuse, recycling in Taiwan worked this way:

Early morning or late at night, a man riding a tricycle trailed a small wagon and his long shadow through an alley piled with waste under a lone street light. He collected the brown glass Taiwan Beer bottles, from a wedding banquet, possibly, and placed them into his wagon. Sometimes he hollered “Empty wine bottles for sale?”

People who make a living out of recycled waste are still visible on the island of 35,000 square kilometres, crammed with a population of 23 million.

Today, plastic bottles are turned into blankets for disaster relief. The Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation has been collecting plastic bottles from Taipei, a city of 2.6 million, for the past three years and converting them into about 244,000 polyester blankets intended for disaster zones. Read a related story here.

As the information age welcomes higher processing speeds and flashy designs, hundreds of old computers are phased out on a daily basis in Taiwan, the island that hosts some of the world’s largest PC makers. After the very valuable gold and silver are taken out, the discarded PC boards in computers are made into beautiful sculptures at the Super Dragon Technology Inc. Read more about the computer art here.

China kinder to Obama than Bush?

How does one measure how U.S. President Barack Obama was received by the Chinese government?

I like to read the tea leaves and decided one measure might be to compare the reception Obama got in comparison with that given his predecessors.

For me, an indication is the most senior Chinese official greeting an American president at the airport.

Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping was the first Chinese leader Obama met in Beijing when Air Force One touched down on Monday. Xi had rushed back on the same day to the Chinese capital from the northern province of Shaanxi, where he was on an inspection tour.

An Internet search showed that in 2002 and 2005, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing was on hand when U.S. President George W. Bush arrived. Li’s replacement, Yang Jiechi, turned up when Bush landed in 2008.

Judging from the rank of the top official greeting the two U.S. presidents, China appears to like Obama more than Bush.

It is no coincidence that Xi was tapped to welcome Obama.

Gritty blast from Taiwan’s gravelly past

Taiwan Premier Wu Den-yih has sued a former opposition legislator for defamation this week, seeking compensation of T$3 million ($92,715), the government news office said.

It’s not just another lawsuit. Lee Wen-chung, the former lawmaker who is now running for county chief executive in central Taiwan, has publicly accused the premier of going to Bali in December with a man involved in a Taiwan gravel mine to protect the operation while benefiting from it himself. Wu, a legislator in December, acknowledges the Bali trip but says he committed no crime.

Taiwan’s public will hope the accusations against the premier are false as their island lags developed Asian peers in surveys about public perceptions of corruption despite more than 20 years of democratic reforms. Graft is still classified as a risk to business on the island (see Reuters report ). Gravel mining was particularly suspect in Taiwan’s history, with local officials feared to be cutting special deals for contracts.

“When you watch the Wu Den-yih saga, it’s really ridiculous,” said Shane Lee, political scientist at Chang Jung University in Taiwan. “It’s people’s desire (to change), but people feel so helpless.”

A Hu-Ma summit in 2012?

When Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou was elected ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman in July, pundits jumped on the idea that he would use his new title to help secure a meeting with China’s President Hu Jintao. The first-of-a-kind summit would follow six decades of strained relations including China’s threats of military force against the island.

Ma’s new job, which he will take in mid-October, allows him to meet Communist Party Chairman Hu in a party-to-party role, laying aside each side’s presidential title. China does not recognise Taiwan’s presidency or other government institutions as it claims sovereignty over the self-ruled island.

Beijing’s state-run China Daily newspaper said such a meeting would signal “great reconciliation.”

A meeting would best take place in 2012, according to a KMT spokesman, Lee Chien-jung.

Before then, Ma will be wary of Taiwan’s divided public, Lee said. Taiwanese generally favour closer economic ties with China but oppose rushing into a relationship with the long-distrusted Communist government on fears that Beijing would compromise Taiwan’s self-rule, including its democracy. Ma will monitor opinion polls for any change in sentiment, the spokesman said, ruling out any meeting in the short term.

Ma could also be embarrased at home if Hu declined to acknowledge his title as president.

Odds of a meeting will surge in 2012 if Ma wins re-election by a big margin in March of that year, which would be an endorsement of China-friendly economic policies that have characterised his administration since he took office in May 2008.

Taiwan’s killer mudslides

After Taiwan’s worst storm in 50 years killed hundreds in massive mudslides last month, the government blamed the freak weather while survivors said the government’s slow response after the Aug. 7-9 storm made matters even worse.

Only recently, with reconstruction under way, have officials in the six-county disaster area begun asking what contributing factors may have caused the steep mountainsides to give way, hurling boulders and walls of mud onto riverside villages below. Nearly 770 people are presumed to have died, most of them buried alive.

In the absence of any official declaration of the underlying causes, residents have filled the void with speculation.

Dalai Lama’s laugh lines

Before the Dalai Lama spoke on the sober subjects of religion and the environment in Taiwan during a speech this week, he opened with a quip about his English.

“First thing, no grammar, no proper grammar,” the 73-year-old said with a low-pitched staccato laugh while addressing a full auditorium of residents in the southern city of Kaohsiung. “There is a danger to get misunderstandings, so I always tell you, be careful Dalai Lama’s broken English.”

His mischievous chuckle and self-depricating humour sent waves of laughter through the audience.

A day earlier, when aides accidentally broke a table in front of the kneeling religious figure, he surprised a somber crowd of about 10,000 local Buddhists with the same laugh, generating applause. During a Tibetan-langauge prayer for the same audience, he suddenly put on a purple sun visor, breaking into English to say the overhead light was too strong. That time the crowd laughed.

Quips and outbursts of laughter characterise the world-renowned Tibetan spiritual leader’s speeches as he uses humour, part of his core personality, to bring him closer to his listeners, people close to him say.

But his visit to Taiwan is hardly a joke. During his Aug. 30-Sept. 4 visit, he has prayed for hundreds who died when a typhoon hit the island last month. On his first full day in Taiwan, the Dalai Lama knelt above a massive landslide that buried a village, praying for the countless villagers who were killed as relatives of the dead stood by.

The Dalai Lama’s visit has also whipped up a new political storm between Taiwan and its long-time political rival China, which claims sovereighty over the self-ruled island and deems the India-based Dalai Lama a separatist who is seeking to split Tibet from its territory. China has cancelled or postponed a few Taiwan-related events in apparent retaliation, chilling relations with the island after a thaw that began in the middle of last year.

Chiang knew he’d lose to Mao

War is the last thing on the minds of Taiwan’s leaders these days as the island government moves to make friends with rival China. Even in far more hostile times, Taiwan’s KMT leadership had privately given up dreams of using force to take control of the mainland, according to documents that are now available for public viewing.

A public opening in May of the forested Back Cihu compound outside Taipei teaches 400 eager visitors per day how the island-based Republic of China government aimed to strike back at the Communist People’s Republic of China, but it ultimately abandoned the idea.

As the county now in charge of Back Cihu worked toward opening the site and its historical treasures to visitors, it came across documents left over from strongman Chiang Kai-shek, detailing schemes to retake China in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Visitors can see some of the records at Back Cihu, which features five buildings and a tunnel that would have housed the government if Beijing ever attacked central Taipei.