Taiwan Youth Drifting Toward Independence

To get a hint of why China might see time as an enemy in its quest to reunify with Taiwan, you need only talk to 21-year-old Shih Ying-ying.

The college junior was born here, as were generations of her family before her. She considers herself proudly Taiwanese, not Chinese. In her eyes, what separates this democratic island from the Communist mainland goes far beyond 100 miles of water--and is getting more pronounced.

“The difference between Taiwan and China is so great that it almost seems impossible to reunify,” Shih said. “I don’t think that just having the same skin color means anything. Culture plays a big part in shaping personalities, and their culture is so different from ours now that it’s hard to communicate.”

What makes Shih’s opinion important is that she will be able to translate it into political action for the first time by voting Saturday in Taiwan’s second presidential election. And she is firm on her choice: Chen Shui-bian, the native Taiwanese candidate whose opposition party has gone on record as advocating independence from the mainland.

Shih is not alone among her peers. A recent poll showed that more than 40% of voters between the ages of 20 and 29 support Chen, a percentage far above those of his main rivals, Vice President Lien Chan of the ruling Nationalist Party and independent James Soong.

And as Shih’s generation grows older, Beijing may see its prospects of peaceful reunification grow proportionately dimmer, rejected by a rising class of young people who see themselves as distinctly Taiwanese and irreconcilably estranged from their counterparts across the Taiwan Strait.

“Taiwan is independent now in reality,” said Angela Tsai, 22, another member of the island’s cell-phone-toting, coffee-swilling, Internet-surfing youth. “I don’t identify myself with mainlanders because I don’t have any life experience similar to theirs.

“I feel like they’re”--Tsai paused, searching for the right term--”foreigners.”

Taiwanese Have Built Own Sense of Identity

These are bitter words for China to hear.

Throughout the decades since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled from the Communists to Taiwan in 1949, Beijing could at least count on the island’s leaders and many of its inhabitants to support the goal of eventual reunification--although the question of who would rule over “one China” was, of course, a matter of hot dispute.

In the last 10 years, however, Taiwan has developed into a lively democracy, with a robust economy and an international profile that have fostered a strong sense of self-confidence and local identity among its citizens, despite an ancient cultural heritage it shares with the mainland.

At the same time, the old guard who escaped to Taiwan from China--and who dominated politics here for nearly half a century--have become a dying breed, replaced by a generation with little memory of, or love for, the mainland.

Fear that the younger generation might be drifting away may have helped trigger China’s stern, if toothless, warning to Taiwan last month not to risk war by dragging its feet on returning to “the motherland.”

China’s military newspaper has strongly warned Taiwan’s voters against supporting Chen in the election. Soong and Lien, who are locked with Chen in a tight three-way race, have tried to scare voters away from him by painting ominous pictures of war and doom across the Taiwan Strait. There are signs that such scare tactics may be siphoning votes away from Chen, as relations with China become a more prominent issue in the final days of the campaign.

For his part, Chen, at 49 the youngest of the major contenders, has moderated his views on China by pledging not to declare independence unilaterally. He also has offered to journey to Beijing to talk face to face with China’s leaders “on any issue, including [the] ‘one China’ [policy],” a spokeswoman said.

Chen also continues to capture the imagination of a large segment of young people in a land where the youth vote could prove critical, with voters younger than 40 accounting for about half the electorate.

“Taiwan needs a younger leader,” said Tsai, a student at National Taiwan University, Taiwan’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. “People my parents’ age think that Chen Shui-bian is too young to be president, which is ridiculous because [President] Clinton and he are about the same age, and the American people believe that Clinton can run the government.”

All three of the major presidential hopefuls recognize the importance of young voters in the election. Each has set up one or more Web sites to get his message out. Each has mobilized student support groups on college campuses.

Soong, 58, draws parallels between Taiwan’s youth and the rebellious generation in the U.S. in the 1960s.

“Young people want to have an international [focus]. They prefer to have international investment and across-the-straits contacts and trade opportunities,” Soong said in an interview. “They don’t want war. . . .

“I was the first candidate to [acknowledge] that it’s old men making decisions to send young men onto the battlefield.”

Even so, a recent survey of Taiwanese students gave Chen the edge with about 38% of student support, more than twice what either Lien or Soong garnered.

Candidate Chen Is Taiwan’s Native Son

Overall, the three candidates are running neck and neck, with each polling between 20% and 25% support islandwide. A large block of voters remains undecided, meaning that the run-up to the election has become a caldron of excitement and unpredictability.

Chen, who belongs to Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party, has assiduously courted young supporters since his days as mayor of Taipei, from 1994 to 1998. He organized citywide dance parties, sponsored jazz concerts and planned a tug-of-war contest that earned him adverse publicity after some of the participants’ arms became entangled in the rope and were literally wrenched off.

He also gained a reputation as a reformer of Taipei’s bureaucracy, an achievement that attracts many of the young, who are fed up with the often-ruthless machine politics of the ruling Nationalists.

But most important, perhaps, is Chen’s identification as Taiwan’s native son, the man who puts the island’s interests first--over and above, if need be, China’s. Both Soong’s and Lien’s platforms give at least a cursory nod to the idea of future reunification with the mainland.

“He’s more focused on the future of Taiwan,” said Fion Chen, a travel agency employee with cropped hair and four earrings in one ear who is emphatic about her support for Chen.

Fion Chen, 22, came of age at a time when Taiwan already had developed its democratic political system, its thriving economic portfolio and its freewheeling social scene.

She considers herself Taiwanese first. In 1994, about 26% of people younger than 40 claimed that label, while 23% identified themselves as Chinese, in a survey conducted by Liu I-chou, a political scientist at National Chengchi University. The remainder said they were both Taiwanese and Chinese.

By 1998, those describing themselves as Taiwanese had increased to 36% among those younger than 40, while self-professed Chinese had dropped by more than half, to 10%.

Liu ascribes the shift to a more open political environment in Taiwan and a backlash against Beijing’s aggressive rhetoric about reclaiming the island by force and its vitriolic denunciations of President Lee Teng-hui.

“The mainland’s harsh measures have had a big effect,” Liu said. “Western media say that Taiwan is drifting away. To some degree, Taiwan is being pushed away.”

Even those who think of themselves as both Chinese and Taiwanese find that the gap between the two sides is widening.

On the mainland, the Communist regime continues to prop up its one-party rule, imprisoning opponents and trying to rein in its market-oriented economy. To young onlookers in Taiwan, China seems the polar opposite of what the island has become. Outright independence might not necessarily appeal to them but neither does reunification.

“I think I’m Chinese--but not mainland Chinese. When I travel abroad, I say I’m from Taiwan, not from China,” said Jessie Huang, 23. “Taiwan is a very small country. Maybe it’d be good to combine with the mainland, which is a big country, but it seems too difficult. Our mind-sets are too different.

“In China, they have a small-town feel, with small-town values, not as open as Taiwan,” Huang said. “Maybe economically they’ll catch up to us. But in terms of culture and values, we’re getting too far apart.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

A Look at the Election

Voters on Taiwan (population 22 million) go to the polls Saturday in the island’s second direct presidential election.

The three main contenders to succeed President Lee Teng-hui are Vice President Lien Chan of the ruling Nationalist Party, Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party and independent James Soong.

The Nationalists, also known as the Kuomintang, or KMT, have governed Taiwan since Chiang Kai-shek fled with his troops to the island in 1949 to escape the Communists. Chiang maintained his vow to one day retake the mainland.

For nearly 40 years, the Kuomintang ruled the tiny island off the southeastern Chinese coast with an iron fist. In 1987, martial law was finally lifted and, in 1996, Taiwan held its first direct presidential election, defying intimidation tactics by Beijing that included lobbing missiles into waters off the island.

Relations with the mainland continue to play a large part in Taiwan’s politics. But with the evolution of Taiwan’s often raucous democracy, voters also have turned their attention to such issues as political corruption, crime and economic performance.