Dear Mr. Chancellor Gerhard Schr(der,
　　 Mr. Secretary-General George Robertson,
　　 Mr. Trent Lott,
　　 Mr. Denny Hastert,

Taiwan launch of the ROCSAT-2, the island's second satellite for scientific research, has been delayed again due to interference from Beijing. The project is doomed to be delayed because the German builder of the ROCSAT-2 --- Dornier Satellite system Gmbh --- cannot obtain an export permit from the German government, the National Science Council said (Oct. 2, 1999).

On the other side, communist China's 50^th birthday celebrations told two stories; the rumbling tanks and screaming jets testified to a nation growing more powerful and assertive. The police cordons spotlighted a government so wary it kept away the masses.

The restrictions weren't just an attempt to keep people out of harm's way from the heavy tanks and intercontinental missiles with discontent simmering over official corruption, mounting unemployment and low incomes, officials left no opportunity for public displays of dissatisfaction.

Taiwanese people can simply vote their President if they don't like them. Taiwan's earthquake is nature disaster only. It isn't related to mythology that old-style rules and superstitions cannot shake Taiwan democratic cultivation.

In the days when emperors and dictators ruled the Chinese world, earthquakes and natural catastrophes were considered portents of these leaders' imminent death and a divine warning of popular discontent with their rule.

The government in Beijing may have played on this mythology when it exploited Taiwan's earthquake to remind the world, the Taiwanese and their obstreperous president that the island remains an integral part of the motherland and must be reunited, even if by force.

But on this bustling island of high-tech computer industries, old superstitions and old-style rules have been replaced by democratic ideas, affluence and a burgeoning belief in the right to self-determination.

"Taiwanese no longer believe they have to wait for an earthquake to change an emperor or a dynasty because today we can simply vote out our president if we don't like him," said Chin Heng-wei, editor-in-chief of the academic monthly Con-Temporary and Taiwan's leading social commentator.

Nothing better illustrated the differences between Taipei and Beijing than the sharp public criticism of the Taiwan government's slow reaction to last week's earthquake tragedy. Taiwanese newspapers exposed the use of cheap and inferior building materials by contractor who ignored the island's anti-quake building codes.

In China, such censure is still taboo.

The earthquake occurred as the governments of Taiwan and China, situated on opposite sides of the Taiwan Strait prepared to mark the 50th anniversary of their separate existences. The anniversaries are already clouded by Beijing's saber rattling and exhortations for reunification with the 22 million Taiwanese who live in what China calls a rogue province.

For the "two Chinas," it has been a half-century of bitter recriminations and a de facto state of war.

While communist China converted from a backward state-run agrarian society to a free-market capitalist economy, Taiwan metamorphosed from an autocratic, sometimes brutal dictatorship into a democracy considered the most lively among the three "Chinese tigers" in Asia --- Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Until Mao Tse-tung's death in 1974, China had too many domestic problems to worry about the "renegades" on Taiwan. "This gave a break to develop without interference. We had our best people educated in the U.S. and they returned to constitute a successful economic elite," said Chin.

By the time Beijing renewed its claims on the island, the two sides had developed in different directions. Today, the gap that divides Taiwan and China is far wider than the 60-mile width of the Taiwan Strait.

"I visited China several times and nothing draws me back permanently. The system has not changed since I was ordered to add more cheerful red color to my somber paintings," said professor Ho Huai-Shuo, 70. "I was beaten up and sent to labor re-education for reading foreign books."

One of Taiwan's leading artists, Ho managed to obtain a permit from China in 1958 to visit his father in Hong Kong and from there went to Taiwan. His paintings now hang in the National Gallery and are exhibited abroad.

Though he feels no affinity with China under the current system in Beijing, Ho, like the majority of Taiwanese, advocates a continuation of the status quo rather than a declaration of independence.

According to a January 1999 survey by the Mainland Affairs Council, only one in five Taiwanese openly favor independence. The survey found that 44 to 60 percent prefer to keep relations as they are and defer any decision on independence.

"Let our children decide the future. It is not wise to mention the two-nation theory and so challenge China. Let's be patient and keep up bilateral interaction while beating the drum of democracy. What value does independence really have?" Ho asked.

This is the kind of pragmatism that has kept Taiwan functioning after Beijing insisted that countries break diplomatic relations with Taipei as a prerequisite for opening embassies in Beijing.

What glues the two together is material interest. China needs Taiwan's know-how and investments. Taiwan needs the huge Chinese market next door.

After the Tiananmen Square killing in 1989, when Western interests withdrew or froze their deals in China, Taiwanese investors sunk more funds into China than anyone else. Together with other non-mainland Chinese, they contributed 80 percent of China's foreign investments.

Chin, 54, came as a boy to Taiwan on a boat his father bought after Mao's army moved into Canton.

"My father told us: 'These soldiers are very disciplined, not like the rag-tag Nationalist army. These fellows will stay for a long time. So let's get out,'" Chin recalled.

The Taiwan the Chin family found was worse than the China they had left.

General Chiang Kai-shek, whose Kuomintang Nationalist army was being defeated by the communists on the mainland, sent troops to prepare Taiwan for an evacuation of his forces. In a brutal reign known as "the white terror," the troops rounded up and executed an estimated 20,000 leading intellectuals, students and professionals on the island.

After 51 years as a Japanese colony, the Taiwanese initially welcomed the nationalist troops as liberators. But for the next four decades, Chiang's army and its followers --- who made up only 15 percent of the population --- ruled the island under martial law and perpetuated the fantasy that Chiang was preparing to recover the mainland.

The general kept a 600,000-member standing army in case the Maoists attacked first. His little offshore Republic of China, considered by the West a bastion against communist China's expansion, occupied China's seat in the United Nations until 1971.

Chiang died at 87 of a heart attack on April 5, 1975. His son, Chiang Ching-kuo, continued as premier, though he began to ease the choke on freedom of expression.

It wasn't until April 1991, when Lee Teng-hui became the island's first democratically elected president, that Taiwan formally declared an end to emergency rule.

Lee, who won re-election in1996, still represents the governing Kuomintang Party and its opposition to reunification with China.

Lee is also a Taiwanese native, as is Lien Chang, the prime minister. Their leadership marks a generational shift away from the mainland exiles and has nurtured the old dream of an independent nation.

"We must declare independence now," said Wu Hi Cha, an associate professor of history and a leader of Taiwan's One Nation party. "Ten years ago this claim would have been dangerous. But today China will not have the guts to wipe us off the map.

Wu believes the call for independence is a legacy of Taiwan's westernization. "You put the notion of independence in our minds," he argued. "Now you have to help us defend it,"--- maybe.

Taiwan needs your help.