Across the Strait: The Impact of the Taiwan Elections

Zoher Abdoolcarim, the senior editor at Time magazine who was a guest in class last semester, recently wrote an essay on the Taiwan elections and the rise of Ma Ying-jeou, the island's new Hong Kong-born leader. Can Hong Kong learn anything from how Taiwan's politics have developed? Even though the "worst-case scenario" for Beijing happened - the election of the DPP's Chen Shui-bian - the sky didn't fall and the Taiwan Strait didn't become a war zone. Now, the Kuomintang are back in power. This is in many ways a more important milestone for Taiwan than Chen's election as President back in 2000.