Special Harmony Between China, Taiwan

Taiwan made headlines again Thursday, but the story wasn’t about heated political rhetoric or jet fighters flying across the Taiwan Strait. And the famous face staring tauntingly from the front pages here wasn’t of that “troublemaker,” Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui.

Instead, it was A-Mei, a Taiwanese pop star who landed in the Chinese capital this week for a series of hugely hyped concerts. And the media coverage couldn’t have been more effusive.

“A-Mei wears sexy and hip clothes,” gushed the Beijing Youth Daily, whose front-page look at “Taiwan’s Spice Girl” elbowed aside a story on job opportunities for China’s vast ranks of unemployed. “She’s uninhibited and lively, which you can see on stage.”

That a singer from the island China calls a renegade province could spark such a sensation amid a diplomatic crisis illustrates the ties that bind mainland and island despite the widening political gulf between the two longtime rivals.

Even as Beijing blasts Taipei for backing away from the idea that there is only “one China,” and Taiwan pushes for recognition as a separate state, things Taiwanese, from money to music to manners, remain extremely popular here.

Top-price tickets costing $240--a small fortune in China--are sold out for A-Mei’s concerts this weekend. One of the most popular offerings on local television is a 48-part costume drama made in Taiwan. Young people consider it cool to affect Taiwanese accents. And Taiwanese businesses keep investing billions of dollars in the mainland, where labor is plentiful and cheap.

Such economic, social and cultural exchanges could bring China and Taiwan--ruled separately for half a century--closer together, in spite of their periodic political sparring and saber-rattling. And it’s such ties that are precisely what makes a full-scale war seem as unlikely to many analysts today as three years ago, when tension ran even higher.

Then, China fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait to intimidate voters in the island’s first presidential election. Now, in spite of a steady stream of invective toward Lee, who ignited a furor last month by redefining Sino-Taiwanese relations as “state to state,” the military response has so far been lower-key, mostly confined to air maneuvers over the Taiwan Strait.

While political dialogue between Beijing and Taipei has basically been suspended as a result of Lee’s comments, Chinese President Jiang Zemin has approved the continuation of cultural and economic ties in an on-going effort to breed interdependence and to make reunification seem both logical and inevitable.

Undergirding this interaction is a common heritage that has produced a remarkable cultural unity among ethnic Chinese the world over.

Communist officials in Beijing constantly refer to Taiwan’s 22 million inhabitants as “compatriots.” Many of the island’s top leaders are displaced mainlanders nostalgic over the land of their birth, although recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in aboriginal and native Taiwanese culture.

A large proportion of Taiwanese still have relatives across the narrow waterway, barely 100 miles wide, separating the island from southern Fujian province.

“We share the same language, the same traditions and culture,” said one 19-year-old Chinese student. “We’re the same race. That makes it easier to understand, to accept and to be attracted by each other.”

Take the Taiwan-produced TV serial “Huanzhu, the Emperor’s Daughter,” so popular that the show--all 48 episodes--is already on its second airing in Beijing.

The historical drama revolves around the royal court during the Qing Dynasty. The actress who plays the title role is mainland Chinese, while the other leading actress is from Taiwan.

“Both are the two most important characters in this [show], . . . and they cooperate in such a fantastic way,” said Su Ge, a professor at Beijing’s Foreign Affairs College who specializes in Sino-Taiwanese relations. “It just shows that despite the political differences, there’s a cultural sameness.”

Taiwanese soap operas are a staple of cable channels around the country; stations pay thousands of dollars for broadcast rights. Many of China’s elite have access to Phoenix TV, a Hong Kong-based network partly owned by media titan Rupert Murdoch, featuring Taiwanese newscasters who have become big names on the mainland. When Zhu Rongji held his first news conference as China’s premier last year, he singled out as his first questioner Wu Xiaoli, a well-known female journalist for Phoenix.

On regular TV, A-Mei’s puckish face and personality hawk Sprite in a mainland commercial seen by hundreds of millions of Chinese.

Another Taiwanese singer, Teresa Teng (or Deng Lijun), commanded such a following in China before her asthma-related death four years ago that people joked about her stardom eclipsing that of the identically surnamed Deng Xiaoping, China’s then-”paramount leader.”

Along with Taiwanese pop culture has come massive financial investment during the past decade. In 1991, there were 84 Taiwanese businesses operating on the mainland; as of June this year, that number had exploded to more than 42,500 Taiwanese-invested business projects here, according to Chinese statistics released today.

To date, the mainland has racked up an estimated $40 billion in Taiwanese investment, in firms ranging from high-tech electronics manufacturers in southern China to the noisy 24-hour Taiwanese fast-food restaurants sprouting across Beijing in the north. In the first quarter of this year alone, 219 companies listed on Taiwan’s stock exchange or the local over-the-counter securities market poured $2.6 billion into China.

The economic and cultural mingling does take on political overtones. Many Chinese fervently believe that Taiwan belongs inalienably to the mainland, as the Communist regime insists.

“Taiwan is part of China. It has always been this way,” said office worker Su Dong, 27. “People who say Taiwan is its own country are wrong. Taiwan has never been a country; it’s just a province.”

But most Chinese want to see a reunification accomplished by peaceful means, not military ones, which the government refuses to rule out as an option.

Beneath the posturing and bickering, said one man surnamed Huang, what links the two sides outweighs what pulls them apart.

“We’re just the same people living in different places under different systems,” he said.