I have to learn not to bring up Taiwan politics with people I don't know. I am a foreign interloper with just enough knowledge to make a fool out of myself. Just yesterday I got into it with a Taiwan tourist who was asking directions. We ended up chatting awhile over a coffee on Christopher Street at Factory. Predictably things broke down along Green-Blue party lines and the notion of Taiwan’s President faking an assassination attempt last summer. No matter what one believes about that episode, I think it is something to which we can never know a conclusive answer. We can lean one way or another on conflicting versions of the events but I keep running into people who are absolutely convinced of their conclusions. I can understand the divisiveness and passion for the DPP and KMT but I think people project their partisan feelings onto the question of what happened that day; what someone thinks happened breaks down along party lines.
More surprising though was this tourist's opinion that Bush is bad and so is Chen Shuei Bien. The comparison seems senseless to me because the politics of the two countries are so different and what divides the electorates is so different. Thinking about the five Taiwan presidents I don't think any of them correspond to any US president. I want to say Bush senior is like Lien Zhan due to his privileged background and plutocratic tendencies but that fit is not even apt. I don't see how the KMT and the DPP can be an analogy to anything we have here either.
This tourist, a chemist and world traveler finally gave the opinion that Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek had been great because there was no corruption back then. Chiang Kai Shek kept organized crime in its place and would have stopped 2-28/White Terror if he could have. At that point I successfully changed the subject.

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