Word: taiwan
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When the exiled tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, last visited Taiwan eight years ago, Beijing went ballistic. To China's leaders, the Dalai Lama is Public Enemy No. 1 for, they claim, fomenting Tibetan separatism. Until very recently, the Beijing view of Taiwan was just as jaundiced and one-dimensional: a renegade province led and populated by disloyal subjects bent on denying China's Party-given right to rule them. Put the two together and you have the mainland's worst "splittist" nightmare. As the Dalai Lama sat down with all the island's then top political figures, Beijing...
...Fast-forward to today. On Aug. 30 the Dalai Lama landed in Taiwan to comfort and bless victims of Typhoon Morakot, one of the deadliest storms to strike the island. The Chinese leadership's reaction to the Dalai Lama's presence? Simply that it "resolutely opposes this." Beijing canceled or downgraded some bilateral events, but these were not deal breakers. For Beijing, which has fired missiles toward Taiwan in the past, the action was akin to throwing a snowball. In fact, on the Dalai Lama's first full day in Taiwan, the two sides, once the most implacable of foes...
...What changed? First, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou eschewed the breakaway bluster of his predecessor Chen Shui-bian and, amid the global recession, hitched Taiwan's economic future to China's growth engine. In just the 15 months Ma has been in office, Taiwan and China have launched a raft of trade, investment, transport and cultural initiatives and exchanges that are inexorably binding the two together. As much as it will ever trust any Taiwan leader, Beijing sees Ma as a pragmatic politician with whom it can do business. (Read "Building Bridges to China...
...genuinely transformative factor is that China now gets Taiwan. The island is a more complex place for Beijing to decipher than Hong Kong and Macau, former British and Portuguese colonies whose governments could make no moral argument against the return of the two territories to Chinese sovereignty. Taiwan is different. Since 1987, when the ruling Kuomintang (KMT) lifted martial law, the island has gradually become a thriving, if somewhat rambunctious, democracy. Its 23 million people determine its future, not Beijing or London or Lisbon. A sizeable portion of the population - some estimates put it at as high as a third...
...very likely prospect. Taiwan's current President Ma Ying-jeou's friendly policy towards China has been a big contrast from Chen, who was often deemed a troublemaker. Since coming to office last May, Ma has forged closer economic ties with China through establishing direct transportation and opening up tourism and investment to the Chinese. But Ma's popularity has suffered a big blow recently from public dissatisfaction with the government's relief efforts after a disastrous typhoon hit the island a month ago. It left over 700 dead and missing and over 7000 homeless. A new premier and Cabinet...