There was another winner in the election this weekend that handed President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan a second term in office -- the faint but unmistakable clamor for democracy in China. ...
As the election played out on Saturday, a palpable giddiness spread through the Twitter-like microblog services that have as many as 250 million members. They marveled at how smoothly the voting went, how graciously the loser, Tsai Ing-wen, conceded and how Mr. Ma gave his victory speech in the rain without the benefit of an underling's umbrella -- in contrast with the pampering that Chinese officials often receive.
"It's all anyone on Weibo was talking about this weekend," said Zhang Ming, a political science professor at Renmin University in Beijing, referring to Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog service.
Users expressed barbed humor about their own unelected leaders -- and envy over Taiwan's prodigious liberties -- but also deeply felt pride that their putative compatriots pulled off a seamless election free of the violence that marred previous campaigns in Taiwan, including a 2004 assassination attempt against the president at the time, Chen Shui-bian.
China's rulers focused on who won. But the important thing is that there was a choice on Taiwan--but not on the mainland.
I've mentioned that Taiwan's mere existence as a democracy is a threat to autocratic China. So speaking of Taiwan "provoking" China misses the point. But who knows? Good things might happen if Chinese people draw dangerous conclusions about whether Asians are capable of handling freedom. The real loser of Taiwan's elections could eventually be China's communist elites.
UPDATE: This could be interesting:
An artist is planning to erect a statue of the Goddess of Democracy—one of the defining images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests—on a Taiwanese island in sight of mainland China.
If the Ma administration doesn't stop the project, of course.
