Caught in Taipei, Beijing tussle

TAIWAN VOTE: CANDIDATE HAILS FROM MAINLAND CHINA

Meeting voters, visiting temples and touring the streets in an open-top truck, Li Zhen-xiu is campaigning hard for today’s election in Taiwan, just like hundreds of other candidates.

But Li is highly unusual: she is originally from mainland China, one of only two people running for the island’s parliament to hail from across the Taiwan Strait.

Beijing regards democratic Taiwan as a renegade province to be retaken, by force if necessary, and the issue of how to manage the island’s giant communist neighbour has loomed large in the election.

Li is running for the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) – a smaller group aiming to break up the dominance of the two main parties.

She is fighting for the rights of the 360 000 spouses of Taiwanese citizens who, like her, are from mainland China, and to “make her small contribution to ease the misunderstandings” between the two sides. “I feel very unhappy when I see mainland nationalists criticise Taiwan, but I am also not comfortable when Taiwanese politicians and media criticise the mainland,” she told AFP.

Asked if she hoped that China could one day be a democracy like Taiwan, she said it would depend on what the Chinese people wanted. “If people in the mainland like the current way of living we should not interfere, but if people’s minds change and they want democracy, we are happy to see that,” she said.

“It’s not our business whether people eat with chopsticks or forks. We should just do the best of our own things.”

Taiwanese voters will choose a new president and lawmakers today in a ballot closely watched around the world as it will determine Taipei’s future ties with an increasingly bellicose Beijing.

China has halted high-level communications with the administration of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen and strangled cultural exchanges – blocking mainlanders from studying in Taiwan and halting tourism from China.

People like Li, living in Taiwan but with family on the mainland, find themselves caught in the two sides’ political tussle.

Spouses from mainland China have to wait six years to apply for citizenship in Taiwan – twice as long as those from other countries. “We don’t want compassion, we just want to be treated fairly,” said Li, who moved to Taiwan 30 years ago and runs her own business.

But if mainland spouses face a long wait for citizenship, it is at least an option for them – and they are allowed to work in the meantime.

For Chinese students studying in Taiwan, the prospects are much tougher, with no right to apply for central government scholarships and no right to find jobs locally after graduation.

“Mainland students are just like locals but we don’t get the same treatment. I think it’s unfair,” said Wooper, a mainland student in Taiwan. –