China Airlines is,in fact,the national carrier of the Republic of China,an entity whose official seal was stamped in my passport on landing. An entity not to be confused with the People’s Republic of China,the overbearing presence across the Taiwan Strait,which some Taiwanese still call “the mainland”.
Newcomers to Taipei also notice the number of streets named after cities and municipalities in China:Qingdao,Hangzhou,Tianjin,Nanjing and Guangzhou.
A briefing at the headquarters of a defence think-tank in a military compound gave us hours of mirth:a dimly lit hall,backdrop of sombre burgundy drapes,long table of experts in front of name tags,seven dark-suited men.
The tableau seemed a caricature of a Chinese Communist Party committee meeting. But only if you ignored the one woman panelist wearing jeans and colourful scarf. And only if you ignored the substance of the briefing and all others we attended:Taiwan is a democracy on the front line of battle over a new global order.
Taiwan is a liberal progressive’s fantasy. Same-sex marriage is legal and reconciliation with indigenous people’s underway. The country’s first transgender minister Audrey Tan is a former anarchist who is as opposed to “surveillance capitalism” as she is to surveillance communism. She spearheads experiments in which citizens help craft government policies on,say,Uber regulation or revenge porn,using social media platforms that engineer consensus rather than the discord corroding liberal democracy around the world.
For the first four decades of its existence,beginning in 1949 when two million Kuomintang nationalists decamped to Taiwan after losing the Chinese civil war to the Communists,the “Republic of China” was an authoritarian state,vying with the Chinese Communist Party for recognition as the legitimate ruler of “One China.” But with the introduction of democratic reforms,a distinctive Taiwanese identity blossomed in what Beijing deems its “breakaway province.”