Taiwan and China’s tumultuous relationship
May 6, 2003

Taipei. When I first visited Taiwan back in the sixties,Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang ruled the island and openly dreamed of returning to mainland China to vanquish their Communist enemies and reunite the country.

They were only on the island, after all, because they had been driven off the mainland temporarily by Mao. The Red Army would have followed and killed them if it could. In fact, 50,000 of Mao’s best troops died trying. They were slaughtered by Chiang’s forces on the beaches of the small island of Quemoy that stood between them and Taiwan and were forced to back off, regroup and wait for another day.

They are, of course, still waiting. The United States extended its protection to the Nationalists, as they were then known. As a result, both sides were stuck with what they had. On both sides of the Taiwan Strait, the struggle to reunite China quickly took a back seat to the very real need the Communist and Nationalist leaders had to feed their troops and their people and begin building the kind of China each envisioned on the land they controlled.

They went about it in very different ways. Mao Tse-tung is believed to have engineered the deaths of as many as 30 million of his countrymen, and once suggested that a nuclear war would be fine so long as the survivors who crawled out of the rubble were Chinese Communists. An icon of the left the man may have been, but he was one bloodthirsty character.

Today mainland China has embraced trade and has opened her economy in a way that has allowed her to begin the economic growth that her earlier Communist rulers hardly dared dream possible. She is richer today than ever before, but her GNP is still only about five times that of Taiwan’s, and the freedom that Westerners hoped might accompany economic growth is no closer than it was the day tanks rolled over the protesters in Tiananmen Square so many years ago.

Meanwhile across the strait, Chiang and his followers began rooting out the corruption that undermined Nationalist rule on the mainland and laying the foundations for a dynamic economy and a liberal democratic state. It took time, of course, but it worked.

The people of Taiwan today enjoy a standard of living second only to Japan in Asia. And the Kuomintang surrendered the presidency without rancor or whining after losing the 2000 presidential election. Indeed, the transition was smoother than in many American cities and states. It represented the first peaceful transition of power ever in any Chinese society.

The vibrancy of Taiwanese democracy is reflected in the statistics. In 1987 there were 31 newspapers and 33 radio stations on the island. Today there are more than 500 newspapers and 174 radio stations.

The Chinese living on Taiwan are tech freaks. A higher percentage of them own cell phones than is the case in any other country in the world and nearly 40 percent of them are regular internet users.

What’s more, they build more computers than any other country in the world. The laptop on which I am writing this column was made in Taiwan, and there’s a better than even chance that yours was too.

Taiwan is our eighth-largest trading partner and actually imports more from the United States than mainland China in spite of the fact that there are 57 times as many people living in the PRC.

None of this would have been possible, of course, without help from the United States. The PRC has some 400 missiles targeted on the island and might well try to take the place by force if Beijing’s rulers didn’t suspect we’d come to the aid of our friends there.

These people remain our strongest friends in this region of the world because they admired and came to share our values over many years. We didn’t build a free and prosperous Taiwan; the people of this island did that for themselves.

But we let them do it by protecting them from their enemies (and ours) while they went about the task. And we supported them when we could, and stood aside when we couldn’t. We gave them some financial aid in the very early years, but what we really gave them were values and ideas by providing the example that the founders of this country suggested would give us more influence in the world than anything else.

It hasn’t worked often, but it worked here. Perhaps the reasons it worked can provide lessons as we embark on the “rebuilding” of Iraq.