Taiwan: Past and Present
by Robert Elegant

TAIWAN IS CHINA IN MICROCOSM; THE ULTRAMODERN FACE OF CHINA-AND CHINA IS THE HUB OF ASIA. CONFUCIANISM DEVELOPED IN CHINA AS A CREED, A CODE OF MORALITY, A WAY OF LIFE, AND A PRACTICAL POLITICAL DOCTRINE. CONFUCIANISM RESTORED IS THE FOUNDATION OF THE GREAT ASIAN RENAISSANCE.

Through the fog, the thunder, and the lightning of the collapse of the old world order, it is clear that Japan has more cash than any other country. The United States, still theoretically the richest, has more debts. But how many know that the second-largest hoard of cash in the world belongs to the Republic of China?

Claiming to be the legitimate government of the vast mainland of China, that state actually rules some twenty million inhabitants of the 14, 000-square-mile island of Taiwan, 100 miles off the coast of Asia. And that pygmy is the second among the cash-rich countries of the world. Preposterous, yet true.

Foreign-exchange holdings are the equivalent of an individual's saving account. At the beginning of 1989, the foreign-exchange holdings of Japan were $97 billion; of Taiwan, $75 billion. Since the balance of nuclear terror makes unlikely all but localized armed conflicts, economic power is now paramount-and Taiwan stands in the vanguard of economic powers.

That reality underlines the importance of the new Asia to the future of mankind. But it is all so recent-and so topsy-turvy-that it requires a major intellectual effort to think of little Taiwan as a major power much less as a superpower. Only in 1951, Taiwan was an impoverished and demoralized pauper state that could not even make its own rifles, much less the arcane electronic devices it now pours forth. After fifty

years of Japanese occupation and five years of reoccupation by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalist regime, the island was an economic wasteland. Further, it was riven by dissension between native Taiwanese and the carpetbaggers from the mainland. Although Chinese by blood, the long-settled families complained that they had been "liberated from the Japanese dogs by the Chinese pigs." Oppression by generals from the mainland and looting by their troops had in 1947 ignited a Taiwanese revolt, which was ruthlessly suppressed.

The people were tense with fear of invasion, even though the Chinese Communists were heavily engaged in the Korean War. It appeared that they would not challenge American power on another front and invite direct retaliation against the People's Republic itself, by mounting an invasion of Taiwan. Yet no one could be sure. And the broken Nationalist armies had abandoned most of their guns in their retreat from the mainland.

Taipei, the capital, was dusty, grimy, and stench-ridden, and its atmosphere medieval. Military police prodded deserters, wearing manacles and leg-irons, across the broken cobblestones. And civilians glanced away in fear. Presumed Communist spies were ritually executed by firing squads. And the resentful Taiwanese longed for the good old days under the Japanese, who had ruled from 1895 to 1945.

Generals and officials, bankers, clerks, and industrialists-all were bewildered by the abrupt alteration in their lives. The Nationalist generals were mourning the loss of honor by their flight from the mainland. Some were salving their hurt by counting the gold bars they had salvaged, even when they could not salvage their big guns. A generation that had fought a long war for a nation as big as a continent had been relegated to a small island. That was the price of having lost the last campaign-the civil war against the Communists.

The ponderous red-brick edifices built by the Japanese to accommodate their colonial government-and to intimidate the subject populace loomed over ramshackle hovels and over walled compounds enclosing dilapidated single-story houses. The open-fronted shops offered few goods beyond bamboo pails, iron dishpans, and coarse blue Coolie clothing. Foodstalls lined the narrow streets, their patrons perched on minuscule stools beside drains flowing with sewage. On a red-letter day in 1951, the first skyscraper was completed-and was immediately occupied by the American economic aid mission. It was five stories high.

Aside from the army's battered jeeps and staff cars, the chief transPortation was the trishaw. Passengers jounced on a high wooden seat set above the two rear wheels; a sweating coolie clung to the handlebars that steered the forward wheel and pedaled desperately. Unsurprisingly, the highway from Taipei to the south turned into a rutted dirt road even before it crossed the city line. Throughout the island only one production enterprise prospered. Slogans newly painted in giant blue ideograms on a white background simultaneously mourned and exhorted, FAN KANG TA LU!- "Reconquer the Mainland!"

A less likely prospect for economic and industrial stardom would be hard to imagine. Aside from strips of fertile land, the island possessed in abundance only water and mountains. But development of hydroelectric power awaited adequate investment. In 1951, Taiwan had fewer than eight million inhabitants, almost two million of them mainlanders. In 1981 the population was almost twenty million, and the differences between mainlanders and Taiwanese were fading. In 1951, Taiwan's total exports had been worth $58 million. In 1988 total exports were $60.6 billion, just half the Gross National Product. The excess of exports over imports was $10.9 billion--of which $10.4 billion was the surplus in trade with the United States. In 1951 each individual's nominal share of the GNP was $48. In 1988 it was $6,045, very comfortably ahead of inflation.

The people of Taiwan are today moving from satisfaction to repletion and, perhaps, satiation with the extraordinary variety of goods available in the specialty shops, supermarkets I and department stores that jostle each other in their cities. The glare of multicolored neon signs and the din of loudspeakers make every night a festival of consumerism. Plums from California compete with rambutan from Indonesia and $100 shirts from Switzerland with gold lam6 skirts from Japan. But most goods, manufactured or agricultural, are produced in Taiwan itself. Bored with the glittering restaurants that offer twenty varieties of regional Chinese cuisine, teenage youths and girls flock to French caf6s to eat "authentic Parisian food" and dance to suave combos.

Stores displaying pre-faded blue jeans and tight dresses with Lurex panels are packed with shoppers from sixteen to twenty-six. Cameras, binoculars, and computers draw acquisitive appraisal along with multicolored shoes, high boots with spangles, and silk scarves. Department stores are thronged with young buyers of chinaware, foodstuffs, and appliances ranging from refrigerators and dishwashers to air conditioners.

The young have money in their pockets, as they never had before. The young are escaping from parental restraints, as they never have before, spending as if good times will never end-and 56 percent of Taiwan's people are under twenty-five. The big restaurants are awash with tourists, mostly Japanese. The atmosphere is hectic close. The decor is tawdry: worn carpets blotched with stains, frayed curtains not quite meeting, and faded vermilion pillars entwined with tarnished gilt dragons. The hostesses wear long satin skirts split to their hips. AIDS does not frighten away the farmers, clerks, and laborers in sharp suits who come for a fling, as their fathers or grandfathers came, but in the uniform of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces.

The massage parlors that were once fronts for brothels are now passe'. Now luxurious "barbershops" cater to such needs. A three-story neon sign proclaims: FAR EAST BEST TONSORIAL PARLOR- SPECIAL TREATMENTS. Plush reception rooms are glimpsed through filmy curtains on the shop windows. Sometimes a token barber chair is on display. Amid the colored lights that glisten on the rain-wet Nanking road, a woman in her early twenties twirls a pert tartan umbrella. She wears scarlet boots, a black miniskirt that just covers her buttocks, and a green silk blouse open to her navel. Her hair gleams jet black, every strand lacquered into place. Haughty disdain on her smooth olive features, she stands voluptuously impatient. A lass waiting for her lover? A call girl waiting for her next appointment? I do not know. I only know that such sights were never seen in outwardly puritanical Taipei four decades ago.

On broad boulevards, narrow side streets, and dark alleys, yellow taxis squeak around portly silver buses. Hordes of automobiles and motorcycles make walking a trial and parking virtually impossible. A five- lane highway leads to the south, where political slogans are now hardly ever seen. No one is much concerned about reconquering the relatively impoverished mainland. A little blase, the people of Taiwan are too busy producing and enjoying the fruits of their dynamic economy.

The complex process that made Taiwan an economic colossus can be , expressed in a single formula: American aid and American purchases+ Chinese talent + the Confucian work ethic = a miracle. The two native factors are at least twice as important as the American factor. Yet the miracle would not have occurred without the Americans, who, further, guaranteed Taiwan's survival as an independent entity.
In addition to the pursuit of wealth by industrial production, Taiwan is
dedicated to the preservation of traditional Chinese culture, which has
been battered in the rival People's Republic of China. Those divergent
purposes are manifest in two complexes about five miles apart: the
World Trade Center and the National Palace Museum.

In 1989 the Trade Center was the largest in Asia, perhaps the largest in the world. It includes an immense display hall with a floor area of twenty-five acres; an office building thirty-four stories high; and a hotel with 1,022 rooms.

The Palace Museum is equally grand, showing fifteen thousand exhibits at a time. That is no more than 2.1 percent of the 700,000 treasures stored in massive, low buildings built like traditional imperial palaces. The Trade Center is, however, totally apart from Chinese tradition. The seven-story display hall with striated pink-and-rose outer walls under a great glass-and-steel roof owes its inspiration to the blunt pyramids of the Mayas and the stepped ziggurats of Babylon. Galleries sweeping around an enormous atrium display tens of thousands of products ranging from bulldozers and steel girders to cosmetics and sun glasses. A heated toilet seat that sprays, dries, and perfumes the pertinent parts is described in a slick brochure for the "tepid medical shower, toilet, and bidet combination," that asks: "Why do the Japanese enjoy longest life in the world?" it answers: "This is simply because they pay special attention to personal hygienics and popularly use shower toilet equipment with warm water cleaning device."

Importers, mostly American, are lured by highly publicized names: Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Valentino, and Lacoste among, them. Taiwan manufactures goods for those designers, but does not object if an independent affixes his own label. The Palace Museum is the antithesis of that splashy display. A cavern within a green hillside overlooking smoky Taipei hoards the supreme masterpieces of more than three millennia: paintings, jade, calligraphy, sculpture, bronzes, and ceramics, as well as lesser arts like enamel and lacquer.

Fourteen thousand crates were prudently packed up in Peking before the Japanese attack in 1937. They were carried across China by steamship and junk, by freightcar and truck, by man-drawn cart and on the backs of coolies, before being unpacked on Taiwan. Those treasures had been accumulated by successive imperial dynasties since A. D. 960 when the first Sung emperor ascended the Dragon Throne.

Among the masterworks of the world's longest-lived culture is a greatly beloved painting called Pai Ma "A Hundred Horses," which is signed Liang shih-ning. That is not the artist's original name. The Italian Jesuit Guiseppe Castiglione took that Chinese name at the court of the Kang Hsi Emperor of the Ching Dynasty in the seventeenth century. He was a mandarin there, a member of the elite civil service that administered the Great Empire. He is today still foremost among the thousands of artists in China who have painted horses over thousands of years.

Except for periods of uncharacteristic seclusion, like that under the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), the Chinese have been receptive to outside influences, always ready to adapt foreign talent and foreign ideas for Chinese use.

The Manchu emperors of the Ching Dynasty (1644-1911) happily employed dozens of foreign Jesuits. But the Jesuits did not succeed in teaching the Chinese to make and use the West's new bronze artillery. The Chinese bad not only invented black gunpowder centuries earlier, but had used both cannon and rockets against the Mongol invaders in the thirteenth century. Yet they could not master the technologically superior cannon of seventeenth-century Europe, the atom bomb of that time. The Manchu emperors could not employ the high-tech European weapons, despite the occasional brilliance of their generals and the great skill of their artisans. Although China was the best-ordered, richest, and most cultivated nation on earth, Chinese officers could not use artillery effectively because artillery, even their own artillery, made them supremely uneasy. Their image of themselves, their fundamental self-esteem, was menaced by the big bronze guns.

Knowing themselves to be the inheritors of the world's oldest and highest civilization, the Chinese could not admit that other peoples might be their equals, much less their superiors. if the foreign bronze cannon were accepted as decisive weapons, they would have demolished China's assertion of supremacy. Since the Chinese of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not thus acknowledge Europe's technological superiority, they were psychologically incapable of employing European cannon--even if their lives depended on it.

The conflict between what they knew they should do and what they could actually bring themselves to do was to bedevil China's rulers for the next three centuries. That conflict still inhibits material progress in the Communist-ruled mainland. In June 1989 that conflict became violent. The student demonstrators and the intellectuals who supported them stood for the fundamental political, social, and cultural changes that alone could make possible industrial progress in the Western manner. The aged autocrats who ordered their slaughter were defending the traditional approach, for they still believed China could use Western technology without altering her authoritarian character. Yen Jyaqi, who was, until June 1989, director of the Institute of Social Sciences on the Communist-ruled mainland, was forced to flee to save his life. He had earlier expressed China's fundamental dilemma forthrightly, declaring, "We must rid ourselves of the conviction that we are superior to all other nations and cultures. As long as we continue to believe that we are the center of the world, we will not be able to learn from the experience of foreign nations-and our progress will be very slow. "

Most Chinese have preferred to believe they could utilize the West's mechanical devices, which are, after all, little more than ingenious toys, without altering their own essential habits of mind. A great viceroy of the Ching Dynasty declared succinctly: "Western learning," which meant technology, was useful for base practical purposes, but "Chinese learning," which meant morals, Philosophy' and government, would forever shape cultural and spiritual life. The viceroy could not imagine that mastering Western techniques, that is, science and industry, would require reshaping the very foundations of Chinese life.

As Yen Jyaqi of the Institute of Social Sciences has pointed out, the People's Republic has not yet broken with the conservative view of China as the uniquely superior civilization among virtual barbarians. The guns in Tienamnen Square proved his point, modern weapons massacring modern men and women to preserve the past. Modernizers and conservatives have contended ever since Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit missionary-scientist, came to the Imperial Court. The stark alternatives were irreconcilable: retain Chinese culture and do without Western machines, or adopt Western ways and virtually jettison the Chinese heritage, an entire way of life.

The conflict for the power between the conservative Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the radical Communist Chairman Mao Tse-tung, from 1921 to 1949, epitomized that intellectual conflict. Chiang Kai-shek was profoundly attached to the teachings of the great Sage Confucius, who died some 2,500 years ago. Mao Tse-tung was determined to scrap Confucian teachings. Yet not the mainland, but Taiwan has, like no Chinese regime before it, adopted Western ideas with great flair and employed Western techniques with great skill.

Looking down on the pale pink modernity of the World Trade Center from the traditional upswept emerald-tiled eaves of the Palace Museum, it is clear that the Chinese of Taiwan have mastered high technology and mass production as their ancestors could not. They appear to have resolved the centuries-old dilemma: How to adopt foreign technology without surrendering Chinese moral, spiritual, and intellectual values- and thus becoming un-Chinese.

Yet the social tensions are great. I fear Taiwan has sidestepped the fundamental conflict, not resolved it. No one can remain traditionally Chinese in thought and behavior while living at the hyper-rapid pace imposed by today's technology.

Taiwan's example has, however, served the Republic of Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong well. All Confucian by heritage, they have retained or modified many Confucian practices. Japan's growth from seclusion to worldwide primacy in little more than a century also sprang from Confucian roots. Born more than five hundred years before Jesus Christ, Confucius has had an effect as profound as Christ's. For a time it appeared that the doctrines of Karl Marx would sweep Confucianism away. But Confucianism, adapted brilliantly to the late twentieth century, as it had adapted to previous eras, has largely edged Marxism off the stage in Asia.

Confucianism is at once a state ideology, a way of life, a religion, a moral code, a manual for rulers, and a handbook for officials. Like Karl Marx, Confucius was a failure in practical terms. Like Marx's, the doctrines of Confucius have been greatly altered by disciples. Yet present-day Confucianism possesses a moral core fashioned by the great sage himself. Hundreds of millions still behave as he directed men and women to behave two and a half millennia ago. Essentially, Confucius taught that human beings would live in harmony and prosperity if they followed a few simple rules. Above all, he taught, mankind was divided between inferiors, whose task was obedience, and superiors, whose task was to provide for the common welfare, largely by setting a sterling example. Paradise could be realized on this earth rather than in a problematical hereafter.

The advantages of a society so ordered are obvious for a modern
industrial --- or even postindustrial-nation. The doctrine ensures or
der. Those at the top must look after those at the bottom, and they in
turn must toil cheerfully. Industrious harmony does not, however, arise spontaneously. Practical Confucianism therefore provides substantial rewards for good behavior and severe punishments for bad behavior. The founders thus created a political, social, and economic entity that endured in China until 1911, little changed in essentials.

Unlike his contemporary Socrates, no portrait of Confucius has survived. All we can see of the man himself is a stereotyped portrait of a long-robed, middle-aged Chinese with a broad face, a high forehead, a benevolent smile, and a wispy beard. He may even have looked like that, but we do not know. His name was Kung Chiu-ni, but later generations called him Kung Fu-tze, which means Kung "the master." The early Jesuits Latinized Kung Fu-tze to Confticius.

He was born in 551 B.C. into a poor but learned family in the feudal state of Lu, one of a number of independent kingdoms that lay in the coastal area now known as Shandong Province, near Korea and Japan. His father was a middle-rank official, the keeper of the state forests. His beloved mother was wise, gentle, and devoted.

That is almost all we know of Confucius the man today. Although he inspired succeeding generations to keep detailed records of the lives of kings and commoners, there is no contemporary record of his life. Confticius became a teacher, rather than a practicing statesman.
Supported, like Socrates, by his students, Confucius, unlike Socrates, was not condemned. He was honored-as long as he kept his fingers out ofpractical politics. Like Socrates, he pronounced on every aspect of the condition of mankind. Unlike Socrates, he was not blessed with a disciple like Plato to record his discourses at length. His disciples jotted down pertinent points, as if taking notes for an end-of-course examination. Their notes were collected later and called Kung-tze Lun Yu (The Analects of Confucius). That work instructs on such matters as the proper way to receive old friends (with joy) to the correct way to serve food (cut into small bits so that diners can use hygienic chopsticks, rather than knives). The Analects'primary emphasis was, however, on politics beingthe art by which human beings could live together with as little friction as is humanly possible.

One of my favorite homilies tells of Confucius coming upon a woman who was weeping over the clawed body of her husband. Her son, too, she said, had been slain by the vicious tiger of the nearby forest.
"Why," the sage asked, "do you not go elsewhere?"
"Here there is no oppressive government!" the woman answered.

The moral is left to the reader to draw. However, Confucius manifestly considered oppressive government the worst evil that can befall men and women.

A visitor once boasted to Confucius that discipline in his state was so perfect "that a son will even denounce his father for stealing a sheep." The sage replied, "With us, the relationship between father and son is more important than [the value ofl a sheep. Here the son would not denounce his father."

The moral is more complex. For Confucius, the reciprocal obligations of protection and obedience between father and son were the model for all human relationships-and for the government of mankind. If one were to inform on the other, the foundation of the social structure would crack. The Confucian state was modeled on the sacred familial relationship, and the emperor was hallowed as the father of all the people. In Chinese everyone is dajya, literally "big family," and nation is gwoJya, literally country-family. "Confucius replied to the disciple who asked about the gods: "The superior man behaves as if the gods existed so as to present a good example to the common people.... Do not worry about whether the gods exist or not!"

Confucian peoples are to this day fundamentally agnostic-except in times of trouble, when they have been Buddhist or Taoist-and are now increasingly Christian. But the successive Confucian dynasties made religious ritual an integral part of government. Every spring the religious ritual an integral part of government. Every spring the emperor offered sacrifices at the Temple of Heaven and plowed a symbolic furrow to ensure good crops. So did the lesser emperors and kings of Viet Nam, Korea, and Japan. Those states sometimes made formal obeisance to the emperor of China. They followed Sino-Confucian customs and ethical standards, which have been preeminent in East Asia for two millennia.

The great edifice of the Confucian state rested on the assured hierarchy of superiors and inferiors: ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger. Rigidity was tempered by tolerance. The sage taught that the highest responsibility of the prince was the welfare of the people.

Life within that edifice was directed by men in whom Plato might have recognized his ideal philosopher-kings. Members of that small group were called gwan, which means "official , but are known in the West as mandarins, from the Portuguese mandar, "to command." Although some greedy and cruel men slipped into office, most mandarins were upright and dedicated. Confucianism meant rule by men rather than by law. It was, however, above all, a meritocracy.

Even poor boys could win admission to the mandarinate by passing the entrance examinations. They could rise by the merit of their work and by passing two further examinations, the equivalent of the modern master's and doctoral degrees. They could even become prime minister if they attained high marks-and pleased the emperor. The examinations and the civil service became a model not only for East Asia, but for the West as well. indeed, most Western nations patterned their administrative services on the Chinese example. Like the Chinese, the Germans put civilian officials as well as military officers into uniform. The nine grades of mandarins wore large insignia ofrank on their chests: birds for civil officials, beasts of prey for military officers. In China, however, unlike Germany, the civilians always ranked before the military.

Despite corruption and favoritism, promotion was normally decided neither by birth nor by wealth, but by merit. The emphasis upon talent and achievement today nurtures both ambitious managers and diligent workers. Obedience to superiors and consideration for inferiors knit the social fabric tightly.

Neo-Confucian behavior has produced the world's most dynamic nations: not only Taiwan, Korea, and, of course, Japan, but also the city- states of Singapore and Hong Kong. Except for Japan and Korea, they are also predominantly Chinese by race. The small overseas Chinese minority has also led the economic development of Southeast Asian nations, largely because of the Confucian work ethic.

Rural Taiwan, still Confucian, has not yet been totally transformed into an industrial hinterland poisoned by noxious fumes and clangorous machinery. There is still space, and there is still a little leisure. On Sunday mornings, farmers bring their finest teas and prize flowers to market under the overpass that crosses Jenai Road near the Howard Plaza Hotel in Taipei. Three and a half dollars buys a pound of the best ooloong, big leaves of a quality rarely exported to the West. You can also buy orchids: cattleyas with big mauve blossoms and great sprays of symbidium. You can buy bird-of-paradise plants with brilliant blueand- orange flowers, gold-tasseled arum lilies, miniature palms, and crimson hibiscus.

Whether you buy or not, you are welcome to sip tea and to discuss the ancient secrets of horticulture. The country people still have time to chat and gossip. All the time Moira and I lived in Hong Kong, Taiwan was our closest refuge. When we needed a respite from the Crown Colony's urban intensity, we would go to Sun Moon Lake and to the mountain peaks called Ali Shan in central Taiwan.

The aboriginal people lived in their own villages around Sun Moon Lake. The gao shandzu, the "people of the high hills," were no longer as fierce as they had been at the beginning of the century, when even the conquering Japanese feared them. But they had not yet been reduced to costumed extras in a staged pageant. Their feather headdresses, bamboo pipes, and big curved knives were not theatrical props, but parts of their normal life around the great lake that on calm evenings mirrors the moon and the stars.

Much has been sacrificed to progress, but much remains. Wispy clouds still drift before the nine-tiered Tzu En Pagoda and veil the golden roofs of the temples of Peace and War beside Sun Moon Lake. Seen from the vantage of 2,500 feet, the island below is intensely green and exuberantly fertile.

This, too, is Taiwan, the eternal Asia. Community with nature and the continuity of humanity are both enshrined in a small Confucian temple with black walls and red doors halfhidden among the dark green pines. At my first visit in 1951, Taiwan was an embarrassment to the United States-a disreputable hanger-on that domestic political pressures prevented successive American administrations from casting off. As late as 1972, 1 saw Taiwan on the brink of despair. Later President Chiang Ching-kuo, then prime minister for his aged father, President Chiang Kai-shek, was aghast at America's moves toward transferring diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to the Communist regime on the mainland. But he told me, with bitter realism, "We can put up with almost anything and survive. As long as America doesn't try to strangle us economically, we will survive!"

Chiang Ching-kuo had, some two decades earlier, stage-managed anti- American riots that culminated in the burning of the U. S. Embassy in Taipei. They protested being forced to withdraw Nationalist troops from several small islands to avoid close confrontation with the Communists. Despite such recurring antagonism, both the government and the people of Taiwan today cherish the special relationship with the U. S. The Nationalists remain'partially dependent on the U. S. for their military security. Besides, unofficial diplomatic relations also endure, although they are studiously nonofficial. The American Institute in Taiwan has replaced the United States Embassy and the Chinese Nationalist Embassy in Washington has become the office in the United States of America of the Coordination Council for North American Affairs. Both the institute and office are headed by senior diplomats who have formally retired from government service, in order to maintain the ostensibly nonofficial bond between their countries.

Confucian constancy and gratitude would ensure the United States a special place in the hearts of Taiwan, even if mutual interest did not still bind the two states. Many of Taiwan's leaders are Americaneducated. Diane Ying, one of the island's most prominent journalists, herselfAmerican-trained, actually deplores the large number of Ph. D. s from American universities in both government and private enterprise. "They're out of touch with the ordinary people," she says.

The Confucian injunction to honor one's teachers all one's life strengthens the bonds between Taiwan and the United States. About 26,000 students from Taiwan are normally pursuing graduate studies in the U. S. It has lately been remarked with satisfaction that more than 25 percent are now returning home, for in the old days, few did. Industry and academia on Taiwan are also recruiting Chinese-Americans with scientific and managerial skills to serve the land of their ancestors.

American influence is pervasive. Taiwan's Little League baseball teams, regular winners in Asian competitions, have often beaten American champions in play-offs. A proud Chinese father explained, "The American kids think it's a game!"

Between 1949 and 1965, American grants, commodities, subsidized loans, and technical advice worth $1.5 billion laid the foundation for Taiwan's present economic structure. The joint Chinese-American Commission on Rural Reconstruction took on the fundamental problem: modernizing the island's backward agriculture. American technology, channeled through the joint Commission, altered everything from prenatal care and primary education to fertilizers, pesticides, and Plows- and made Taiwan a better place to live. The most radical-and beneficial-alteration was land reform. The moving spirit was the American agronomist Wolf Ladejinsky, a stocky, amiable, complex man who spoke with a Russian accent and had overseen land reform in both Korea and Japan. Distribution of land to new owners revitalized the rice crop in the paddy fields; the farms that produced vegetables, hogs, and chickens; and the groves that yielded bananas and pineapples.

Having resisted land reform on the mainland, the Nationalist authorities gladly cooperated on Taiwan. Dr. Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of the Republic of China, had promised, "The tillers shall own their land!" Besides, the mainlanders were not giving away their own land, but the land of Taiwanese.

In return, landowners got shares in government-owned industries like the Taiwan Cement Corporation, which had little value. Later' when industry prospered, the Taiwanese got rich-and assertive. Virtually monopolizing political and military power, the mainlanders had generally left commerce, industry, and agriculture to the old families. Becoming rich, the Taiwanese reached out for the levers of political power. Even before the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo, in January 1988, the Nationalist regime had begun to liberalize its structure largely to meet Taiwanese demands for a much greater role in the government. After the June 4 massacre in Tienamnen Square, Taipei could boast even more convincingly that it was truly the only "Free China." The effective dictatorship of the mainlanders of the Nationalist party had passed with the elections of 1989, which were for the first time contested by legal opposition parties.

The evolution toward limited democracy would occur because the American shield had, since 1950, kept the Communist People's Liberation Army from following up its victory on the mainland by attacking Taiwan. For decades American destroyers had patrolled the Taiwan Straits, and American fighter squadrons had blocked air raids. The Nationalists can today defend their island alone because American mat6riel and American counsel made their armed forces highly effective.

Only American support sustained the island I first saw in 1951, which was so different from present-day Taiwan it might have existed in another era. Yet the fate of Taiwan is today still intertwined with the continuing prosperity of the U.S. Since there were no hotels, most nonofficial visitors then stayed at the rather archly named Friends of China Club. The concrete building had once housed a Japanese officers' club and later the Chinese Officers' Moral Endeavor Association. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a Methodist convert, attempted through the Moral Endeavor Association to keep from lewd diversions-like social dancing-the officer corps he could not keep from major corruption. A block away, special restaurants" catered to appetites not satisfied by food and drink, as ornate "barber shops" did in the 1980s.

The exodus from the mainland had brought to Taipei the culinary talent that had served a great nation of gourmets. The restaurants were, however, small and cramped. I was introduced to Sichuan cuisine in a shack called the Yd Yflan. When a train passed on the track two yards away, the spindly stools trembled, the pots rattled, and the walls shook. But the clear oxtail soup was the best I ever tasted-or hope to taste.

I was in my early twenties, and I was a real foreign correspondent. I was also something of a pet of the experienced correspondents and local officials because I could speak and read Chinese. Although it was too hot for trench coats, I reveled in the glamour of foreign reporting when I boarded an overnight train with American-educated Major Herbie King. We were going south to see the commander of the ground forces of the Republic of China. The dimly lit Japanese Pullman car was drab, and the narrow bunks were child-length. Since Taiwan was at war, the train was blacked out and the station platforms were dark. The 220 miles from Taipei to Kaohsiung, now forty minutes in a Boeing 727, took more than fourteen hours.

Our train lumbered into Kaohsiung at 10:00 on a late-summer's morning in 1951. Now the chief industrial complex of an industrial nation, Kaohsiung was then still deeply scarred from American bombing in World War 11. Shabby, lethargic, and dispirited, it appeared to have abandoned all hope.

An ancient Chevrolet staff car took us to Pingtung, the headquarters of General Sun Li-jen. He received me cordially. I was writing an article for The Reporter on the Nationalist military forces, and even a very J . unior American reporter was important. The Nationalists' survival depended on America.

Besides, General Sun genuinely liked Americans, perhaps more than he liked most of his brother officers. A graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, he had been a prot6g6 of General Joseph W. Stilwell, the American chief-of-staff of the Nationalist armed forces during the war. He was also a favorite of American correspondents. That popularity did riot endear him to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

After the war the Generalissimo promoted only generals who were personally devoted to him. Professional competence did not count. After the retreat to Taiwan, the American connection still handicapped General Sun Li-jen. Blaming his defeat on American intervention, or, alternately, on lack of American intervention, the Generalissimo set his face against the general who was so close to the Americans. But the Generalissimo soon realized that American goodwill was his only hope of surviving in Taiwan, much less reconquering the mainland. To please the Americans, he appointed General Sun commander of the ground forces. Sun was not restored to the Generalissimo's favor; he was swallowed with a shudder like a particularly nasty medicine.

Although they had lost China by their ineffectiveness and their corruption, the Nationalists, epitomized by the Generalissimo, still appeared to many vociferous Americans to be the white hope of anti. communism in Asia. President Harry S. Truman had been reducing the level'of American representation on Taiwan and had been maneuvering toward diplomatic recognition of the Communists. Whatever their faults, they did rule the Chinese mainland. Attacked for being "soft or, communism," Truman was forced to reverse that policy.

When the Communists committed the "Chinese People's Volun. teers" to battle against American troops in Korea, the president's options were foreclosed. Having sent those troops into action against the Communists, he was forced to send an ambassador to Taiwan. He also ordered the U.S. Navy to patrol the Taiwan Straits-to prevent either Nationalists or Communists from invading the other's territory.

Harry Truman staged a big show in Taiwan, largely to placate Taiwan's American friends, who were called the China lobby. Starring the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group, Truman's show was virtually Chinese in its emphasis on appearance over substance. As long as it appeared that Washington was staunchly supporting the Nationalists and effectively retraining their armed forces, the reality was of secondary importance. General Sun Li-jen felt apressingneed to make the strongest possible case for his troops and himself to the American public. The general was heavy-boned, in gray-green fatigues with four silver stars on the collar, His tanned features were blunt, bold, and open. I have since that time seen the same expression on the faces of other generals. William Westmoreland, who commanded in Viet Nam, had that trusting, direct look-as if life and politics were essentially simple matters that had been maliciously complicated by civilians.

Sun Li-jen noted that the army he commanded had been routed and humiliated. His first task, he said, was to restore the confidence of the bone-thin, ragged regulars who had retreated to Taiwan rather than surrender to the Communists. They were bewildered and depressedin a word, demoralized. His troops, the general said, had to be reequipped and retrained if they were to become effective fighters. But first they had to unlearn the bad lessons of the past.

"I'm like an artist who's been given a canvas spoiled by someone else's, daubs," he explained. "Before I try to paint my masterpiece, I've got to scrape the canvas clean." His troops nonetheless put on a brave show for an audience of senior officers of the U. S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group and a lone reporter shouting hoarse war cries, the infantrymen charged. Explosions mimicking artillery fire threw up fountains of earth, and firecrackers popped like small arms. Possessing no radios and few field telephones, the officers conveyed their orders as had their ancestors in battle against the Mongols seven hundred years before. Bugles blared, whistles shrilled, and colored flags gyrated. A lean lieutenant sernaphoring scarlet signal flags was a stick figure against the faded blue-velvet sky. Around him rolled gray smoke streaked with black. Grinning soldiers were firing Browning automatic rifles into the traditional horseshoe-shaped graves on the hillside.

The live rounds shattered the tombstones. Already indignant at the soldiers' scarring their fields with explosives, the Taiwanese farmers were infuriated by the desecration of their ancestors' graves. A Nationalist major explained half apologetically that the infantry had to hold its maneuvers somewhere. "These troops need to start with basic training," an American colonel later confided. "Elementary squad tactics afterward. The officers obviously never heard of a flanking movement. All they know is the frontal attack, which is sure to get them all killed." During the next four years, General Sun Li-jen was to work at his masterpiece with much success. He created a new and effective army, even enlisting Tai I wanese, whom most mainlanders distrusted. He also
intrigued ineptly against the Generalissimo. He went to the Americans, who were also fed up with the Generalissimo's authoritarianism and ineptness. With American support, he promised, he would mount a coup detat; establish a progressive and efficient regime; train a crack army; and be ready to retake the mainland. General Sun had chosen the wrong confidants. True, the Americans would have preferred a more progressive regime. But they did not want the Nationalists to invade the mainland-and provoke a wider conflict in which the Soviet Union would come to the aid of the Chinese Communists. Besides, backing a coup against the Generalissimo would have aroused the wrath of the China Lobby. Sun Li-jen's offer inevitably leaked-and he was arrested. He finally reappeared in public in 1988, after more than three decades of house arrest. The American connection had not served him well.