I don't think the undertone in Hero could represent the main stream. In fact, the director Zhang Yimou has been widely criticized for whitewashing for a tyrant. The film actually has become a laugh stalk for its ridiculous plot.
As for Qin Shihuang (another name for Shi Huangdi), most of your comment are correct, except that Zheng was his given name and YING was the surname. He certainly was an influential figure and events related to him did change the course of history. But mind you it was two thousand years ago. A lot of equally important (if not more important) events happened afterwards. Simply attributing everything today to a man died more than 2000 years ago is very much over-simplification, if not totally wrong.
Indeed, the real problem in Chinese legal system is not fixing some sentences in the constitution or making more laws to protect the people. It's far more complex than that. In the past two thousand years before the 1911 revolution, no rule-of-law in the modern sense existed in China. The social order was maintained by categorical monarchy power on top, a complex system of beaucrats in the middle and grass-root family ties at the bottom. Although the ROC established in 1911 and the PRC taking its place in 1949 both have had a few versions of constitutions, the spirit of constitution has never managed to get itself cross to the mass and as a result, governments have never really seriously enforced it.
Aware of the situation, generations of ocial elite have been struggling to build up such rule-of-law tradition in China since the late 19th century. But revolutions, civil wars backed by foreign powers, Japanese invasion sanctions during the cold war and communist blunders of pre-Deng Xiaoping era meant the seed had never got a fair chance to grow. Most part of the 20th century saw China in upheaval. If the same situation had happened in 19-century US for comparably long period, what the founding fathers of America envisioned in the US constitution would not have been realized either.
Now it has been almost 30 years since China has had a chance to focus on improving its people's lives. Dreams of generations are gradually coming true, albeit slowly. Everything complex enough takes time to mature, democracy, rule-of-law tradition, etc... they don't just happen.
To be honest with you, I don't know much about both men's fate. It has become a legend over the years. No one seems to be sure what happened to them afterwards.
According to the most popular version, the man in front of the tank is Wang Weilin. The clip only captured one of his heroic actions. He stopped tanks in other two occasions. Some said the third tank ran him over. Some said he's still alive some where in China. No reports about his arrest.
There was even less known about the tank driver. Some said the head of that tank division was detained for being sympathetic to "the mob". I would guess the tank driver must have been penalized too. As you said, "following orders" is not a good reason to kill the innocent, but to a soldier, it still takes a glitter of humanity if not courage itself to do what he did.
Not seeing the victim face to face, it must be easier for pilots to throw bombs though.
Sure President Abraham Lincoln was shot dead, but does that mean slavery won?
His life or death is an intriguing topic. But the most important thing is that he showed up at the darkest moment. The courage lives on even after the hero dies. There are numerous people in China doing courageous things at the very moment. What the government did/does can not represent all Chinese.
Not all Americans became evangelical crusaders when dubya invaded Iraq. What I'm trying to say is simple as that.
the P4's design isn't inherently bad, for a desktop/workstation chip.
Which part of the design? Pushing up the clock rate at the cost of all other aspects of designing a desktop CPU? That _IS_ certainly WRONG.
IBM can do 5GHz with Power6 because they can afford to manufacture it with much higher cost. Power6 can have larger die size, better heat dissipation packaging, more complicated and expensive processes (e.g. possibly SOI) and lower yield per wafer. Power6 is for highend servers, which is not sensitive to cost per unit as desktop processors.
Intel's marketing department certainly had been overly optimistic in believing they could push clock rate up indefinitely. The stretagy they pursued was to throw AMD behind in clock rate alone, at the cost of all other aspects of CPU design. They were so determined as to overlook the basics. When Athlon outperformed P4 with much lower clock rate, they didn't stop. When battery of a P4 laptop lasted only 1 hour, they didn't stop. When Prescott generated too much heat to be mounted in a normal PC case, they wasn't plan to stop, but had to.
It's good for Intel that netburst finally hit a brick wall. Such a strategy is never meant to sustain in the first place. Only blindness in believing one's monopoly power could've lead to this expensive mistake. May P4 rest in peace.
You're right. Although "Fa" and "Lun" are in seperate characters in Chinese, the combination makes a basic meaning and as such "Falun" is preferred over "Fa Lun" when translated into English.
Thanks for making this distinction.
Yet I wonder how many people in the west actually REALIZE the difference WHILE they bashing China? I bet no more than 1 percent, at most. If they don't realize this, how do you expect the normal Chinese to percept the intention to be "benign"? In many case, the attacker just wants to vent his/her upset at this uncertain time annotated by China's rising. The less than democratic Chinese government merely happened to serve as an easy target of insult.
Of course, China is not the only victim of such xenophobic feeling. Another example is the recent racism scandal on UK's reality TV show "Celebrity Big Brother".
Did Jade Goody realize her insult to Shilpa Shetty had a racism context? I bet she did not. If she had given any thought about it, she must have known what a bad publicity this could mean to her career. She just picked an easy target, which happened to be Shetty, in an environment full of tension, i.e. the Big Brother house, to divert her anxiety. To make some excuse for her attack, she unwisely chose something very Indian - obviously there's no much she knew about Shetty to attack with - and now racism became evident.
I've met people's actions as such in the UK so many times as to easily recognize the pattern. People appear to be nice as long as they don't feel the competition or they are taking advantage of it. Once they feel the anxiety, they often choose to attack. In such case, the alien and underpriviliged becomes the first target. This is just an unfortunate side of human nature. After all, individual westerners are just people too.
The bright side about western society, however, is that racism has been recognized as unacceptable because of historical reasons. But what the mainstream fail to recognize is the root of racism is nothing but human nature. You can ban racism a million times, but human nature brings it back from time to time, or just find its way in other form - as the AC post before mine pointed out, anti-communism is just the other guise of it.
True. Except that Epoch Times is usually full of anti-Chinese propaganda.
It is actually run by the notorious Fa Lun Gong cult. The 'epoch' here refers to the new era the cult is supposed to bring us into, with the leader kind like Jesus. A lot of the stuff on that media, especially the Chinese version, is total crap. Despite its lack of credibility, Epoch Times seems always have quite a lot of money to burn. You can sort of pick up the recent copy FREE at major convenience shops in your local Chinatown, amongst stuff like Jehovah Witness's pamphlets. I even once found copies of both language versions at a community library here in UK.
To your first question, China does not have the kind of control over Taiwan as the British had over its American colonies. In that sense, China has nothing to lose if Taiwan declares independence.
However, if the DPP government stops meddling with cross-strait economy links, it will be Taiwan, not China, who enjoy most of the benefit. Various reports from international research institutes attribute Taiwan's declining economy to DPP's reluctance to embrace the booming Chinese market.
So I'm afraid you've asked the wrong government. It's not the question whether PRC should let go Taiwan, but whether DPP should let go its anti-China stance.
As for the second one, yes, albeit large scale conflict not be very likely soon. But bad things happened in the past. For recent ones, see
Given the US administration's record, Chinese can never trust those neoconservative politicians in Washington. I mean, did Iraq ever threaten any attack to the US in 2003? Has any WMD been found in Iraq at all? Do the Iraqis deserve suffering the consequence of dubya's decision?
Just for your information, Tibet has been in China's rule (at least) since the Qing Dynasty, long before the US took New Mexico and Texas.
As for Taiwan, the status quo is the direct result of a Chinese civil war fought between the KMT and CCP in the late 1940's. KMT lost and flet to Taiwan. No cease fire treaty has been signed between both sides since 1949. Technically, the civil war hasn't ended yet. Just both party have chosen not to fight for now.
After all, getting China some bad publicity is all that is important. Now that the Pentagon could demand more funding from Capitol Hill, pointing fingers at China, "Red China is targetting our military satelites with a laser gun. This could affect our ability to destroy Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai." Needless to say, China's intention must be evil, even the weapon isn't there.
If the US is so benevolent and brave to become the world police, let people outside US have a vote on your hawkish president too! Then we can probably talk about disarm every other country on the planet.
Thanks for your point. This is exactly what my sig tries to reveal.
There's a tendency among some slashdotters to ignore the difference. In fact, they often refer to the tragedy in 1989 with the sole intention to humiliate Chinese as a nation. If this is not racism, I don't know what racism is.
Your information from Wikipedia is accurate. But the gp doesn't seem to be totally ignorant of this. The post is very likely to be a flamebait, as you might have noticed.
That's because most of Hinet is on the other side of the broken fibers. Your connection to the US is not affected. Try visiting some sites in Hong Kong and you will notice the difference.
This unfortunate earthquake happened to expose unfortunate planning of the Asian submarine fiber network. Almost all major conmmunication fibers took route via the seafloor between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which is subject to earthquakes.
Indeed, the *nix way is far more elegant than the guy's solution. The guy's probably not aware of the tools available on a *nix host. Or worse, he could have chosen some IIS host, in which case, it's not likely he'd know *nix well.
That being said, it's still a nice hacking attempt. He'd probably be converted to the *nix way sooner or later if reading slashdot is of such importance to him. Once the door is open, there're endless opportunities.
Please ignore the parent post, my friend. He probably is not that ignorant to think Shenzhen is in Taiwan. He just wanted to provoke people and make some fun. There're a million mischievous surfers out there, you simply can't educate them all, especially when they don't really care about facts. Let's just make our points and move on.
It seems every country has its own problem to deal with. I do not intend to criticize Mr Bush here. There's already enough talking about him. And besides, he's not my president. However, I'm very pleased to answer your questions.:-)
As an oversea Chinese, I currently live in the UK. Living situation here is not too bad, except the weather;-p. I grew up in China and spent my first 20 some years there. Needless to say, I've been always keen on developments back in my home country and as a fluent Chinese speaker, also have access to first hand information and opinions from different sides. I think I'm somehow in a position to express my views. However, because China is such a big and diverse country and I'm not living there, I can only speak for myself.
Firstly, I honestly don't think boycotting Wal-Mart or all goods made in China would make any difference at all. Even if western consumers could really make their actions together to stop Wal-Mart sourcing from China, there'd always be some other countries' workers being exploited all the same. It's capitalism and consumerism society that made the present situation. Customers want to pay less for more. Wal-Mart wants to maximize their profit by forcing vendors selling cheap. Factories want buyers' orders to keep in operation. Local officials want more tax revenue and are easily bribable. The workers, most of whom are from rural China, want to make a living. It's getting harder and harder to maintain a livelihood on the land. They don't have a choice but being exploited in the factories. This is very sad. I know it very well because I've been to such factory before, as a field support engineer. My deepest sympathy goes with them. However, as someone who has learned a little world history, I know the Chinese sweat shop workers are not alone. Similar things happened before in 19 century Britain, pre-war US and in fact, any industrializing country. Wealth created during the industrializing process is not farely distributed to the whole society because of the greediness in human nature.
The only difference here is that before most people were not conscious about it and there wasn't adquate legislation to protect the workers. Nowadays, such conditions are easily made known to everyone through the Internet. Moreover, the stereotypical image of a communist regime makes the western perception over this matter worse.
However, blaming the communists for what capitalism does is totally misleading. Labour camps, gulag and such have nothing to do with the workers conditions. If China was still in such dreadful communists' rule today, how could it be so many capitalists in good business there?
Not only has the CCP today lost its big brother like power it used to have decades ago, also the government is no longer monolithic. There're often reports about local officials being defiant to the central government over economic policies. Liberal officials and scholars who has close connection with the government often express views publically that are very different to the orthodox. The whole society is changing, rapidly.
Although democracy is still among the many things Chinese people would like to achieve, corruption, the lack of a rule-of-law tradition, and the absence of a critical press are the direct threats to a common Chinese seeking a better life. Lot of Chinese are well aware of the above and are fighting to get things straight. There are setbacks, but I sincerely hope more improvements are coming, because it not only in Chinese people's interests, also helps to make the world a better place.
For thousands of years, the Chinese have been such an intelligent and innovative nation, there's no reason for me not to believe, that after putting behind those ideological nonsense we can't overcome the problems today.
Taiwan is not an independent nation, has never been an independent nation, and will never be an independent nation.
Does it really matter at all? Independent or not, Taiwan sees no future outside the Chinese economy. DPP government's de-sinolization policies have no other effect than a weakened economy, and perhaps, hatred among its own people.
What's the point of independence? "Because PRC has never ruled Taiwan?" Have a good look at the ROC constitution, is there any room for Taiwan independence? No. That's why DPP hates it so much and wants to change it so much despite the objection from the US. Yes, the United States of America, not People's Republic of China. As it gets no one any benefit but is such a risk to Asia-Pacific security.
But hey, now president Chen Shui-bian's solicitors are holding the ROC constitution as a shield in court defending his wife's graft case. They even invented a theory: 'what the president thinks a state secret is state secret, therefore no written document is needed to present in the court to prove anything.' As the constitution prevent Chen from indictment, they are hoping this will protect his wife too. How pathetic!
If those guys really want it so much as to fight for it, then go fight for it. That's at least decent. Provoking PRC behind the protection of the US is timid. Whining at the provoked action is even more cowardish. The DPP certainly does not care about the real consequences. Whenever the big clumsy communist party reacts, the DPP gets the votes. That's how democracy in Taiwan works. That's also the reason why Chen plays an independence hardliner every time there is a election coming. When the election is over and the US expresses its dismay, Chen plays reconciliation. It worked every time for him since his coming to power in 2000.
The PRC government learned his tricks over the years. You don't see them criticizing Chen anymore. They are now 'putting hope on the Taiwanese people'. That's logical. Why waste your effort fighting a ideological war that no one never wins when you can do something more meaningful such as boosting the economy and bringing the real benefit to people accross the Taiwan Strait?
I think this shows exactly how politically divided Taiwanese people are over their own identity. This used to be a non-issue about 15 years ago, because at that time, the word Taiwanese is neutural. It only refers to people live in Taiwan, with no ethnic implications. But now, thanks to the brainwash by pro-independence politicians, everything labelled with Taiwan is good, with China, bad. Migrants who came to Taiwan after 1949 are sinful, because their connection to the mainland. Their descendants too, even though a lot of them never set foot on the mainland for once. This has now become a issue of political correctness. In Taiwan, if someone admits himself a Chinese, he's sinful. He'll be treated as potential traitor. Everything he does is wrong and he deserves all kinds of humiliation and verbal abuse from the 'true Taiwanese'. If he's not smart enough to keep silence, he'll be asked to leave.
On the other hand, the president Chen Shui-bian is a 'true Taiwanese'. Everything he does is impeccable. The embezzlement charges against him is clearly politically motivated to overthrown the 'Taiwanese regime'. If he's appropriated any government money, it must be the system's fault, not his. Because the opposition party, KMT, set up the system in the past, the KMT (read Chinese) is to blame, even though they've never touch the money this way before or after the DPP's coming into power.
Thinking this is too ridiculous to be true? Just google 'chen shui-bian receipts scandal'. It may give one a clue on what's going on in Taiwan, but not much, as the English language media have always had a biased view on such matters.
Slashdot Mirror
As for Qin Shihuang (another name for Shi Huangdi), most of your comment are correct, except that Zheng was his given name and YING was the surname. He certainly was an influential figure and events related to him did change the course of history. But mind you it was two thousand years ago. A lot of equally important (if not more important) events happened afterwards. Simply attributing everything today to a man died more than 2000 years ago is very much over-simplification, if not totally wrong.
Aware of the situation, generations of ocial elite have been struggling to build up such rule-of-law tradition in China since the late 19th century. But revolutions, civil wars backed by foreign powers, Japanese invasion sanctions during the cold war and communist blunders of pre-Deng Xiaoping era meant the seed had never got a fair chance to grow. Most part of the 20th century saw China in upheaval. If the same situation had happened in 19-century US for comparably long period, what the founding fathers of America envisioned in the US constitution would not have been realized either.
Now it has been almost 30 years since China has had a chance to focus on improving its people's lives. Dreams of generations are gradually coming true, albeit slowly. Everything complex enough takes time to mature, democracy, rule-of-law tradition, etc... they don't just happen.
To be honest with you, I don't know much about both men's fate. It has become a legend over the years. No one seems to be sure what happened to them afterwards.
According to the most popular version, the man in front of the tank is Wang Weilin. The clip only captured one of his heroic actions. He stopped tanks in other two occasions. Some said the third tank ran him over. Some said he's still alive some where in China. No reports about his arrest.
There was even less known about the tank driver. Some said the head of that tank division was detained for being sympathetic to "the mob". I would guess the tank driver must have been penalized too. As you said, "following orders" is not a good reason to kill the innocent, but to a soldier, it still takes a glitter of humanity if not courage itself to do what he did.
Not seeing the victim face to face, it must be easier for pilots to throw bombs though.
His life or death is an intriguing topic. But the most important thing is that he showed up at the darkest moment. The courage lives on even after the hero dies. There are numerous people in China doing courageous things at the very moment. What the government did/does can not represent all Chinese.
Not all Americans became evangelical crusaders when dubya invaded Iraq. What I'm trying to say is simple as that.
Which part of the design? Pushing up the clock rate at the cost of all other aspects of designing a desktop CPU? That _IS_ certainly WRONG.
IBM can do 5GHz with Power6 because they can afford to manufacture it with much higher cost. Power6 can have larger die size, better heat dissipation packaging, more complicated and expensive processes (e.g. possibly SOI) and lower yield per wafer. Power6 is for highend servers, which is not sensitive to cost per unit as desktop processors.
Intel's marketing department certainly had been overly optimistic in believing they could push clock rate up indefinitely. The stretagy they pursued was to throw AMD behind in clock rate alone, at the cost of all other aspects of CPU design. They were so determined as to overlook the basics. When Athlon outperformed P4 with much lower clock rate, they didn't stop. When battery of a P4 laptop lasted only 1 hour, they didn't stop. When Prescott generated too much heat to be mounted in a normal PC case, they wasn't plan to stop, but had to.
It's good for Intel that netburst finally hit a brick wall. Such a strategy is never meant to sustain in the first place. Only blindness in believing one's monopoly power could've lead to this expensive mistake. May P4 rest in peace.
Your post is much better than my "score:4 informative" post. Well done.
Of course, China is not the only victim of such xenophobic feeling. Another example is the recent racism scandal on UK's reality TV show "Celebrity Big Brother".
Did Jade Goody realize her insult to Shilpa Shetty had a racism context? I bet she did not. If she had given any thought about it, she must have known what a bad publicity this could mean to her career. She just picked an easy target, which happened to be Shetty, in an environment full of tension, i.e. the Big Brother house, to divert her anxiety. To make some excuse for her attack, she unwisely chose something very Indian - obviously there's no much she knew about Shetty to attack with - and now racism became evident.
I've met people's actions as such in the UK so many times as to easily recognize the pattern. People appear to be nice as long as they don't feel the competition or they are taking advantage of it. Once they feel the anxiety, they often choose to attack. In such case, the alien and underpriviliged becomes the first target. This is just an unfortunate side of human nature. After all, individual westerners are just people too.
The bright side about western society, however, is that racism has been recognized as unacceptable because of historical reasons. But what the mainstream fail to recognize is the root of racism is nothing but human nature. You can ban racism a million times, but human nature brings it back from time to time, or just find its way in other form - as the AC post before mine pointed out, anti-communism is just the other guise of it.
A pithy and insightful post.
It is actually run by the notorious Fa Lun Gong cult. The 'epoch' here refers to the new era the cult is supposed to bring us into, with the leader kind like Jesus. A lot of the stuff on that media, especially the Chinese version, is total crap. Despite its lack of credibility, Epoch Times seems always have quite a lot of money to burn. You can sort of pick up the recent copy FREE at major convenience shops in your local Chinatown, amongst stuff like Jehovah Witness's pamphlets. I even once found copies of both language versions at a community library here in UK.
However, if the DPP government stops meddling with cross-strait economy links, it will be Taiwan, not China, who enjoy most of the benefit. Various reports from international research institutes attribute Taiwan's declining economy to DPP's reluctance to embrace the booming Chinese market.
So I'm afraid you've asked the wrong government. It's not the question whether PRC should let go Taiwan, but whether DPP should let go its anti-China stance.
As for the second one, yes, albeit large scale conflict not be very likely soon. But bad things happened in the past. For recent ones, see
The Yinhe Incident, http://www.answers.com/topic/yinhe-incident
The Chinese Embassy Bombing, http://www.aeronautics.ru/nws002/afm151.htm
Given the US administration's record, Chinese can never trust those neoconservative politicians in Washington. I mean, did Iraq ever threaten any attack to the US in 2003? Has any WMD been found in Iraq at all? Do the Iraqis deserve suffering the consequence of dubya's decision?
Sure way to win a debate! Well done.
As for Taiwan, the status quo is the direct result of a Chinese civil war fought between the KMT and CCP in the late 1940's. KMT lost and flet to Taiwan. No cease fire treaty has been signed between both sides since 1949. Technically, the civil war hasn't ended yet. Just both party have chosen not to fight for now.
If the US is so benevolent and brave to become the world police, let people outside US have a vote on your hawkish president too! Then we can probably talk about disarm every other country on the planet.
There's a tendency among some slashdotters to ignore the difference. In fact, they often refer to the tragedy in 1989 with the sole intention to humiliate Chinese as a nation. If this is not racism, I don't know what racism is.
This unfortunate earthquake happened to expose unfortunate planning of the Asian submarine fiber network. Almost all major conmmunication fibers took route via the seafloor between Hong Kong and Taiwan, which is subject to earthquakes.
That being said, it's still a nice hacking attempt. He'd probably be converted to the *nix way sooner or later if reading slashdot is of such importance to him. Once the door is open, there're endless opportunities.
Please ignore the parent post, my friend. He probably is not that ignorant to think Shenzhen is in Taiwan. He just wanted to provoke people and make some fun. There're a million mischievous surfers out there, you simply can't educate them all, especially when they don't really care about facts. Let's just make our points and move on.
Hey, this is slashdot. Some people NEVER read TFA and always assume they knew it! Besides, everything in China has to be evil, doesn't it?
As an oversea Chinese, I currently live in the UK. Living situation here is not too bad, except the weather ;-p. I grew up in China and spent my first 20 some years there. Needless to say, I've been always keen on developments back in my home country and as a fluent Chinese speaker, also have access to first hand information and opinions from different sides. I think I'm somehow in a position to express my views. However, because China is such a big and diverse country and I'm not living there, I can only speak for myself.
Firstly, I honestly don't think boycotting Wal-Mart or all goods made in China would make any difference at all. Even if western consumers could really make their actions together to stop Wal-Mart sourcing from China, there'd always be some other countries' workers being exploited all the same. It's capitalism and consumerism society that made the present situation. Customers want to pay less for more. Wal-Mart wants to maximize their profit by forcing vendors selling cheap. Factories want buyers' orders to keep in operation. Local officials want more tax revenue and are easily bribable. The workers, most of whom are from rural China, want to make a living. It's getting harder and harder to maintain a livelihood on the land. They don't have a choice but being exploited in the factories. This is very sad. I know it very well because I've been to such factory before, as a field support engineer. My deepest sympathy goes with them. However, as someone who has learned a little world history, I know the Chinese sweat shop workers are not alone. Similar things happened before in 19 century Britain, pre-war US and in fact, any industrializing country. Wealth created during the industrializing process is not farely distributed to the whole society because of the greediness in human nature.
The only difference here is that before most people were not conscious about it and there wasn't adquate legislation to protect the workers. Nowadays, such conditions are easily made known to everyone through the Internet. Moreover, the stereotypical image of a communist regime makes the western perception over this matter worse.
However, blaming the communists for what capitalism does is totally misleading. Labour camps, gulag and such have nothing to do with the workers conditions. If China was still in such dreadful communists' rule today, how could it be so many capitalists in good business there?
Not only has the CCP today lost its big brother like power it used to have decades ago, also the government is no longer monolithic. There're often reports about local officials being defiant to the central government over economic policies. Liberal officials and scholars who has close connection with the government often express views publically that are very different to the orthodox. The whole society is changing, rapidly.
Although democracy is still among the many things Chinese people would like to achieve, corruption, the lack of a rule-of-law tradition, and the absence of a critical press are the direct threats to a common Chinese seeking a better life. Lot of Chinese are well aware of the above and are fighting to get things straight. There are setbacks, but I sincerely hope more improvements are coming, because it not only in Chinese people's interests, also helps to make the world a better place.
For thousands of years, the Chinese have been such an intelligent and innovative nation, there's no reason for me not to believe, that after putting behind those ideological nonsense we can't overcome the problems today.
"Oh, you are from America. Isn't that somewhere near Guantanamo?"
Does it really matter at all? Independent or not, Taiwan sees no future outside the Chinese economy. DPP government's de-sinolization policies have no other effect than a weakened economy, and perhaps, hatred among its own people.
What's the point of independence? "Because PRC has never ruled Taiwan?" Have a good look at the ROC constitution, is there any room for Taiwan independence? No. That's why DPP hates it so much and wants to change it so much despite the objection from the US. Yes, the United States of America, not People's Republic of China. As it gets no one any benefit but is such a risk to Asia-Pacific security.
But hey, now president Chen Shui-bian's solicitors are holding the ROC constitution as a shield in court defending his wife's graft case. They even invented a theory: 'what the president thinks a state secret is state secret, therefore no written document is needed to present in the court to prove anything.' As the constitution prevent Chen from indictment, they are hoping this will protect his wife too. How pathetic!
If those guys really want it so much as to fight for it, then go fight for it. That's at least decent. Provoking PRC behind the protection of the US is timid. Whining at the provoked action is even more cowardish. The DPP certainly does not care about the real consequences. Whenever the big clumsy communist party reacts, the DPP gets the votes. That's how democracy in Taiwan works. That's also the reason why Chen plays an independence hardliner every time there is a election coming. When the election is over and the US expresses its dismay, Chen plays reconciliation. It worked every time for him since his coming to power in 2000.
The PRC government learned his tricks over the years. You don't see them criticizing Chen anymore. They are now 'putting hope on the Taiwanese people'. That's logical. Why waste your effort fighting a ideological war that no one never wins when you can do something more meaningful such as boosting the economy and bringing the real benefit to people accross the Taiwan Strait?
On the other hand, the president Chen Shui-bian is a 'true Taiwanese'. Everything he does is impeccable. The embezzlement charges against him is clearly politically motivated to overthrown the 'Taiwanese regime'. If he's appropriated any government money, it must be the system's fault, not his. Because the opposition party, KMT, set up the system in the past, the KMT (read Chinese) is to blame, even though they've never touch the money this way before or after the DPP's coming into power.
Thinking this is too ridiculous to be true? Just google 'chen shui-bian receipts scandal'. It may give one a clue on what's going on in Taiwan, but not much, as the English language media have always had a biased view on such matters.