Dispatches From Taiwan: A Tale Of Three Chinas

One of the myriad benefits of regular international travel, I’ve found, is that it exposes me to issues and other pieces of information (tech and otherwise) that are relevant in regions other than my little home corner of the world. Back in the States, for example, the bulk of ongoing international news attention in newspapers and television is devoted to Afghanistan and Iraq. Those two topics aren’t ignored here in Taipei, of course, and in fact I’m enjoying being able to weigh multiple perspectives on them courtesy of the fact that my hotel room television tunes in CNN International, the BBC and Al Jazeera.

But other countries’ trials and tribulations garner proportionally more attention here by virtue of proximity to Taiwan. Rising tensions caused by North Korea’s recent nuclear weapons tests, American journalist convictions, and other saber-rattling postures are of great worry to that country’s neighbors, of course. And the People’s Republic of China (PRC, i.e. Communist China) is also an ongoing concern, both in general because of the scope of its geographic and population presence, and specifically because the Republic of China (ROC, i.e. Nationalist China, i.e. Taiwan) has had tense-at-best relations with the PRC just 180 km away for the past 60 years.

June 4^th marked the 20^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The PRC’s preparations for and actions on that day were still receiving heavy news coverage here in Taiwan three days later, when I arrived. As many of you might already have heard, the PRC government took drastic measures to suppress electronic discussion and coordination for the purposes of protest by its citizens. Access to social networking sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Live.com and Hotmail were blocked, many PRC ISPs and sites were completely ‘down for maintenance’, and international news segments containing any mention of the Tiananmen incident were dynamically blacked out within the PRC.

Over the past ~36 hours, I’ve also seen increasing coverage here (as well as, apparently, the United States) regarding a recent decree from the PRC government that computer manufacturers pre-install website blocking software on computers sold in the country, effective as of July 1. PRC officials claim that the purpose of the software is only to block access to pornography, not to suppress a broader flow of information and communication, but others’ skepticism of the PRC’s assertion is perhaps understandable. Computer company representatives have also expressed concern that the software may cause poor Internet access performance and lead to security holes. And since the PRC’s utility is Windows-only at this point, OS X and Linux users are off the hook, anyway.

In contrast, I’ll first share how touched I was watching coverage of the massively attended and peaceful candlelight vigil held in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park on Thursday night. The last time I was in Hong Kong was a year prior to the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the PRC. I’d heard at the time of my visit that the PRC planned to give Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy, in no small part to encourage the region’s continued economic success. The contrast in the PRC’s stance regarding the Tiananmen anniversary between Beijing and Hong Kong was a striking example of the latter’s ongoing political independence.

I was similarly struck by the cultural dissonance between the PRC and ROC while at lunch yesterday. We ate at one of the country’s multiple Five-Cent Driftwood House restaurants, this particular one in Taichung City. Their owner and chief designer, Hsieh Li-Shiang, is a woman in her early 40s who is formally trained neither in architecture, cooking or restaurant management and came from a background of extremely limited financial means, but has become a success story in Taiwan due to an abundance of hard work coupled with a fair amount of good luck. Here’s a shot of one of the pieces of art that was hanging nearby our table:

I daresay you probably wouldn’t see an abstract sculpture of a naked-torso woman on the wall of a restaurant on the other side of the Taiwan Strait. More generally, I confess that I struggle to imagine a scenario in which a budding female entrepreneur in the PRC would be allowed to pursue her dream (culinary, technology, or otherwise), far from succeeding at her endeavor. And even as a man, I think I know in which country I’d prefer to focus my company-launching and -building energies.

I hope you enjoy a few of the other shots I took of the restaurant’s insides and exterior. And yes, the food was outstanding!