TAIPEI -- Most of us are used to thinking of Taiwan as that small economic miracle off the coast of China that is the key producer of microchips for the information age. It only erupts into our awareness whenever one of its leaders threatens "independence" or seeks to purchase destroyers from the US to patrol the troubled seas that separate it from the mainland, provoking Beijing into anachronistic fits over sovereignty.
We may even remember the dramatic reports from our parents about Madame Chiang Kai-Shek coming to the US to plead for aid to help Western-style modernization, expel the Japanese and halt Mao albeit under the dark cloud of authoritarianism and corruption. Some even know Taiwan provides a third of the orchids to the United States.
But Taiwan is much more; a small island with lots of soft power. Above all, it is a hybrid culture, in many respects even liberal with gay rights to boot, that successfully mixes the civilizational attributes of America, China and Japan, which occupied it for 50 years. Indeed, it is the only country in the Asian region not consumed with anxiety over Japan rewriting its constitution, still doing massive business with China and sticking with America all at the same time.
After many weeks of huge, raucous demonstrations (called the "color revolution" because of its use of red) demanding that President Chen Shui Ban step down because of corruption, the state prosecutor recently indicted the president's wife and some close colleagues, promising to indict the president as well once the immunity of office expires. This will likely force Chen Shui Ban out of power, marking a sharp contrast with the top-down, back-door anti-corruption purges across the straits in Shanghai that have as much to do with power plays as with cleaning up government.
In short, Taiwan is a true tale of the kind of cultural cross-fertilization that 21st century globalization promises to bring. For now, Hong Kong, though under China's clumsy thumb, is still too Western to do what Taiwan has. Singapore is too authoritarian. South Korea is too nationalist, despite the presence of tens of thousands of US troops. Japan is just too different. As powerful as the allure of the West may be to China's urban coastal elites, the pull of hundreds of millions of peasants weighs down its cultural evolution. Meddling cultural commissars who still distrust what they can't control further hold back the imagination.
In all of Asia, only Taiwan could produce an Ang Lee, director of "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," a globally-appealing movie which combines Asian sensibility, following traditional myths, with Hollywood production values. Ang Lee's brother, Zhan Lee, the director of Zeus Pictures, an indy studio in Taipei, is blunt about the future fusion of film in Asia: "Hollywood is a dinosaur that has destroyed and occupied our minds for too long," he says, "The world if full of new stories waiting to be told, and new audiences waiting to hear them, even if we use Hollywood's template to do so."
No doubt this soft power is far more important to Taiwan than a seat at the United Nations, which it endlessly pursues but will never materialize given China's immense weight in the formal institutions of global governance. But, so what?
If ever we were to lift our gaze from the clash of civilizations between the West and the Muslim world, we could get a different glimpse of the future looking at Taiwan. It is a window, or, in more cinematic terms, an aperture, to the new Asia which blends East and West like in Ang Lee's films.
When we finally tire of focusing our efforts and attention on the bloody Middle East, a glance West across the Pacific affirms a different future. We shouldn't ignore what Taiwan has accomplished.