Taipei channeling 1950

I recently spent a week in Taipei, constantly wondering why we seemed to be stuck in 1951. Taipei is one of my favourite cities where constancy seems to be one of the biggest virtues, but the anachronistic political attitudes of many who I had encountered puzzled me.

Of course, I was there to do "research", which meant spending all my daylight hours in an archive, trying to digest pages and pages of handwritten meeting minutes and press coverage of the KMT. These actions may well have informed the way I thought about Taiwanese society during the trip -- but they did not prepare me for some of the comments I had heard at the Occupy Central solidarity protest.

The most meaningful (and frankly what had caused me to leave) was on student organiser's speech: "Our ultimate goal is to take down the Chinese Communist Party." This was followed up "Taiwan and Hong Kong should unite and take down China." I was a bit concerned -- were we still stuck in 1950? Was the spirit of Chiang Kai-Shek channeled through the Liberty Square venue?

Another taxi driver voiced a slightly concerning sentiment: "I hate the DPP but the KMT is too weak to do anything about it. I wish the CCP will come and just defeat them all."Also present at the protest venue was the Pan-Green alliance ("Taiwan and Hong Kong should unify and defeat China because we are not them and we don't need them") and some kind of libertarian (ok, perhaps downright anarchist) student group selling T-Shirts that said "Fuck the Government".

Yet if you look outside of this cross-section of Taipei society, people seem happy, kind, and content with their way of life. My only unpleasant run-in was with a mainland Chinese tourist who demanded change from a 100 RMB note, in RMB, for a 50 NTD purchase at a fruit counter. Hong Kong's style of politically correct, polite dissent and mainland China's way of self-censorship seem to be foreign concepts in Taipei.

Perhaps this is positive, that the Taiwanese seem to be so comfortable with speaking their thoughts, even if such thoughts may be half-formed or inappropriate for a certain situation. None of this has put me off going back to the pleasant island for more work or leisure, of course, but the mentality does strike me as interesting.