A Family Straddles 50 Years of Taiwan-China Division

At the end of China’s bloody civil war 50 years ago, Chen Hsiu-ying left Shanghai in a desperate hurry, carrying only a suitcase with a few silk dresses, some hidden gold and her 3-month-old son in her arms. She was certain she’d be back soon.

Chen and her soldier husband were fleeing with the defeated Nationalists to exile in Taiwan--an island across a narrow stretch of sea south of Shanghai. But it was only for a few years, they thought, until the Nationalist leaders could regroup and reclaim sovereignty over the mainland from the Communists. She had named her son Hu-sheng, characters meaning “prosperous Shanghai”--a reminder of the good life and the family she meant to return to.

Half a century later, Chen lives with her son and grandchildren in a Taipei house as large as the mansion her family lost to the Communists in Shanghai. The brother whom Chen left behind was sent to a labor camp because of his association with her and the Nationalists, and ended up a factory worker. Chen, now a vigorous 78, often thinks about the way things turned out.

“When I left, I left my whole family behind,” she says. “When I say ‘home,’ I still mean Shanghai.”

Thus began the split that would divide families and a nation in a sustained competition for the right to be known as the one true China. It is a struggle still raging, and the division has defined lives on both sides of the 115-mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

Like Chen’s family, Taiwan and China have gone their separate ways in their five decades apart. Taiwan has a thriving free-market economy that far outpaces China’s and a blooming democracy that makes citizens feel they would be taking a step backward to be under even nominally Communist rule. Taipei has given up the claim to govern all of China, but it demands a status equal to Beijing’s.

Beijing, recognized by most of the world as the government of China, declares that if Taiwan moves toward independence, it will bring the island back to the motherland by force if necessary. In July, after Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui declared that Taiwan should have a “special state-to-state relationship” with China, the Chinese army scrambled to high alert, and recently, Chinese jets ventured into Taiwanese airspace, raising tensions even higher.

As much as democratic Taiwan feels separate from the mainland’s Communist Party-led government, there are still strong ties to the motherland. There are thousands of families like Chen’s that span the strait, 55,000 marriages between mainlanders and Taiwanese, and at least $30 billion in Taiwanese investment in China.

But there are still wide differences of opinion about where Taiwan belongs. In Taiwan, a series of polls has shown that a clear majority favors keeping relations the way they are, with gradual evolution toward either independence or reunification, depending on China’s progress. In China, however, polls show that most people cannot fathom independence for Taiwan, which they regard as a province of the mainland.

Attitudes are divided by generation as well as by the strait. Chen’s son, the baby named for Shanghai, is now a politician who thinks that Taiwan should reunite with China. His daughter, in turn, isn’t so sure.

Even though her son is a politician, Chen insists that she doesn’t care about politics. But when it comes to China, she is adamant about one thing. “Taiwan should not be independent. It is part of the mainland. The Kuomintang [Nationalists] failed, so we went to Taiwan,” she says, “but we are still Chinese.”

Chen doesn’t need to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t gotten on the boat to Taiwan that September day in 1949. Her brother’s parallel life and relatively early death told her all she needs to know.

In 1950, Chen wrote a letter to her brother, Yu Zhifu, from Taipei. But afraid that the government would find out that he had ties to the enemy Nationalists in Taiwan, he burned the letter and asked her not to write again. Yu eventually was sent to the labor camp, and the government took all the family’s property, including the big house where Chen grew up.

The two didn’t get in touch again until 1980. That time, Yu, then a factory worker, tried to find Chen in Taiwan.

“She was scared because her son was a top official in the Kuomintang, and she asked us not to write again,” says her nephew Yu Pingan, 52, who works in a Shanghai machine tool factory.

In 1984, Chen finally saw her brother again after a 35-year separation, when the governments began to allow relatives to come back for visits to China.

“She visited us in our small public apartment, where some of us had to sleep on the floor, and she said, ‘You really have suffered,’ ” nephew Yu says. “At that moment, I thought the mainland couldn’t compare to Taiwan.”

Yu looks around his new apartment in Shanghai, a two-bedroom flat with a television, a video disc player and a washing machine but no dryer; his wife rushes to pull in the laundry flapping outside the window as a rainstorm begins.

“Even now there’s a gap. But we’ve had great changes here,” Yu says. “China includes Taiwan, and Taiwan can’t be separated from the mainland. The Chinese people won’t allow that to happen. The government won’t let it happen either--if Taiwan wants to split, the army has to attack.

“But I hope China will take back Taiwan in a peaceful way. I have relatives there.”

In Taipei, legislator Fung Hu-sheng, 50, hasn’t forgotten the city he was named for. He has visited the mainland and his relatives several times in the last decade, and was a guest philosophy professor at Beijing’s prestigious Qinghua University. Once a secretary to former Taiwanese President Chiang Kai-shek, he has made it his mission to find common ground for Taiwan and China.

“All people over there are also my people. They just belong to a different political system. We hope we can help them enjoy a better life, a democratic life, like us,” he says in his legislative office.

“We hope for reunification, but the method should be peaceful and democratic. We don’t want to be unified by force. We don’t want to be governed by a communist system. I disagree with the Taiwan independence movement: It is dangerous and risky, and it could cause a civil war and bring the U.S. into it.”

That is a sentiment he is trying to pass on to his daughter, Fung Fu-hua, 24, a sociology student at Taipei National University. But like many people of her generation, she was born in Taiwan and has no special nostalgia for or loyalty to the mainland. She feels that Taiwan is a separate country but that it isn’t worth a war to prove that.

“I argue with my grandma every day about China,” she says with a bright smile. “I think people who live in a democratic system can’t live under communism. If Taiwan and China unify, it will be many, many years away.”

She concedes that her ideas may tilt more toward the West than toward the mainland, despite her father’s efforts.

“I wanted to go to college in the United States, but my father wants me to live on this island and help fuel change in Taiwan,” she says. “I don’t really agree. It’s a political idea. If you want to live a better life, you can’t live in only a political way.”

She has been to the mainland three times and visited her cousins in Shanghai twice. She says she wouldn’t want to live there but respects her relatives for working to better their lives.

“The students study very hard, and I think it is improving very quickly, while our daily life in Taiwan is getting worse, and the students here just play a lot,” she says. “I think we will meet at some point.”

Yu Lei, 24, is the same age as his cousin Fu-hua in Taipei and is acutely aware of their differences. He works at an auto parts factory in Shanghai and is about to get married.

“When I was a boy in primary school,” he says, “the teachers would say bad things about Taiwan and tell the other kids not to play with me because I had relatives in Taiwan.”

He shrugs.

“Now things have changed. I kind of admire Taiwan. The economy is better, and my cousins have much greater opportunities than I do. If I have a chance, of course I’d go there, but I can’t because I don’t have a direct relative in Taiwan.”

What if Taiwan wanted to be independent?

“I think it doesn’t matter if Taiwan becomes independent. My relatives won’t be hurt,” he says. “I think that the type of government does matter.

“I’d like to vote for a president, and I think people should have the opportunity to vote for whoever can contribute more to the country,” he says, adjusting his glasses to avoid his father’s questioning glance. “Maybe when I’m my parents’ age, we will all have the same idea.”