two canadians, one frenchman, and an american

The Canadians
I met two interesting Canadians in the last 24 hours. Louis, from Quebec, I met last night. His first trip to Asia was to Mongolia at the age of sixteen. He told a great story about being lost in the Gobi desert for two days on a horse that was supposed to know where it was going, but didn't. The other Canadian, Mei Su Wee, is a Ph.D. student at the University of Toronto, her mentor in the graduate school program there is Joseph Wang, who gave a great lecture at Davidson this past spring. Her thesis involves a comparison between democratic reform in South Korea and Taiwan.
The Frenchman
That same night I also had a great conversation with Mathiew, a very articulate and thoughtful French graduate student studying cross-strait politics here on a fellowship from a political university in Paris. Although part of our conversation centered on the recent political game we both participated in, discussed below, a lot of what we talked about regarded Jarred's thoughtful blog regarding Francis Fukuyama and the French rejection of the EU, accessible here. Mathiew explained his belief that "the two main factors still are the kind of social/economic factors of the EU that French people still reject... [and that] Chirac implied himself too much in the campaign, so it became a protest vote against Chirac."
The American
Tonight I attended a talk at the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy given by Randy Schriver, the former assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs. Mr. Schriver, a Democrat who served under both Clinton and (until recently) Bush, spoke about Taiwan's importance as a democracy and the opportunities and challenges of China's increasing importance. He noted that "democracy is Taiwan's greatest asset, and it's what binds Taiwan together with the United States... there was a little poking fun at President Bush after his inaugural; people counted how many times he said 'freedom' or 'democracy.' But I think for places like Taiwan the memory is still more fresh -- how hard it is to get these things."

He made an interesting comment about Chinese diplomats, explaining, "their diplomatic corp has grown extremely effective, extremely skilled... it wasn't so long ago that if you bumped into a Chinese diplomat at a state function, you could excect a response that stuck pretty close to the script... but they've become very creative, very clever." In response to a question about America's attempt to "contain" China, he said "if we were trying to contain China, why would we be the largest source for China's direct investment, the ones who are training many of China's elite scientists and engineers?... some analysts say that even if they become democratic, confrontation between the United States and China is inevitable, but a powerful, democratic China is something in the future we would welcome."

But in response to a question I asked him about a nytimes article discussing tiny democratic reform efforts taking place in China, he explained that "I see little indication that the central government, the authorities in Beijing, are ready to launch on an experiment towards greater political participation, I think if anything, there's been a crackdown on things like use of the internet, there's been a crackdown on house churches... i read the same article, and i've seen the same reports, but i think on the whole i'm skeptical."
To read more about his visit and speech, go to: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2005/07/12/2003263183