Hey, I just noticed your entry here, and thought I might shed some light. I've been living in Taipei for almost eight months now, and while I'm neither an expert on Taiwan nor politics generally, I do know that many Taiwanese (particularly those in the current ruling KMT party) do NOT want to be alienated from China. This party is in fact the one founded by Sun Yat-Sen and later led by the separatist Chiang-Kai Shek (the general who lost to Mao in the People's Revolution and took those loyal to him to settle in Taiwan), and they have some cred as far as Taiwan's interests go. Now this is not to say that members of this party have not come a long way since the "pure" old days (everything in Taiwan that's old is "pure"); indeed most are embroiled in corruption charges that would make their dirty Chinese counterparts cringe. Their argument is that the benefit to Taiwan of reunification would outweigh the costs of remaining socio-politically and economically free. To virtually all outsiders this is a fucking bullshit sham, but demagoguery is powerful, especially in collectivist societies. The former president from the other major party (the DPP) has recently been thrown in jail on corruption charges and has been defamed. His trial transcript reads like a Monty Python sketch, seriously. Also, to give you an idea of the tone here, we recently got two pandas as gifts from the Chinese government to the Taipei City Zoo. Their names are Yuan-Yuan and Tuan-Tuan. Apart the names don't really mean anything, but together, "yuan tuan" means reunification.