Taipei 101 skyscraper, modeled on the shape of bamboo
Today is the last day of my two-week stay in Taiwan, visiting relatives. Taiwan is often overlooked by Westerners in favor of China. My mother is from China and my father is from Taiwan, but I want to argue that Taiwan is more Chinese than China. If you want to experience China at its fullest, go to Taiwan, not China!
Why?
First of all, Taiwan and China have the same culture, the same ethnicity, the same language, but it’s all packed into a very small area in Taiwan unlike China which is spread out over the third-largest nation in the world in terms of geography. I remember reading in a guidebook once which said, “Taiwan is the distilled essence of China.” Do you really want to travel thousands of miles, when you can get everything you want within a few hundred miles?
Secondly, Taiwan was not affected by communism, so it is more “pure” in its Chinese-ness. Communism or Marxism was a Western ideology which came in and ruined China. Taiwan is what China should have and could have been if communism did not scar the face of the country.
Thirdly, Taiwan retains the traditional Chinese characters. What Mao Zedong did was to simplify the Chinese characters because they were “too hard” for people. Instead of raising literacy, he dumbed down the writing system! In China today, they use this ugly half-truncated system of writing, whereas Taiwan retains the calligraphic beauty of the traditional Chinese characters in all their glory.
Fourthly, Taiwanese people speak Mandarin Chinese better than the mainlanders do. Well, perhaps this is a personal preference, but in Beijing they have this ugly “retroflex” accent where they slur and roll the ending of every word. It sounds awful! Go to Taipei and the accent is much more pure and clean, in my opinion.
Fifthly, Taiwan is one of the “Four Little Tigers” of Asia, along with South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In the 1980s, Japan was the big dragon. And in the 2000s, China became the rising big dragon. But in between, in the 1990s, these Four Little Tigers experienced unprecedented economic booms, to the point where they are just as modernized as any Western country, maybe even more so. Yet, all retain their unique cultural flavor. It is the best of traditional meets modern. The Taipei 101 skyscraper, from 2004 (when it was built) until just a few weeks ago (January 2010) was the tallest building in the world. It has since been surpassed by the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, but still, the Taipei 101 is a symbol of the economic prosperity of Taiwan.
Sixthly, Taiwan has some of the greatest Chinese sights in the world. See the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial (it rivals the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC), the Martyr’s Shrine (the Changing of the Guard rivals that of Buckingham Palace in England), Sun Moon Lake (its beauty rivals that of Lake Como in Italy), Taroko Gorge (Taiwan’s mini Grand Canyon), and of course the National Palace Museum. The last is Taiwan’s pride and joy, it is often considered the “Louvre of Taiwan” because it has the greatest collection of Chinese artifacts in the world. When Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist forces lost the civil war in 1949 to Mao Zedong’s Communist forces, Chiang took all the greatest Chinese treasures from the Forbidden City in Beijing and fled to Taiwan, and placed them in the National Palace Museum. You won’t see anything like this collection, not even in China.
Most Westerners don’t have a clue about Taiwan, and I think they’re missing out. I think the only three things that mainland China has over Taiwan are the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and the city of Guilin (with its fabulous mountains). But Taiwan has just about everything else!
Chiang Kai-Shek memorial