Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
In the spring of 1995, President Lee delivered a speech to a gathering
of alumni at his graduate alma mater, Cornell University in New York,
where he had earned a Ph.D. in agricultural economics. Ironically, the
mainland Chinese government, in spite of its long record of
haranguing the United States for interfering in China's internal affairs,
tried to pressure the U.S. government into refusing to grant Lee a visa.
Their reasoning was that Lee, as president of a government that nei-
ther the United States nor China recognized as legitimate, should not
be allowed to travel abroad because his travel in his official capacity
as “president” of the “Republic of China” might lend him some air of
legitimacy and implied official recognition. If Lee wanted to go abroad
later as a private citizen, after he had stepped down from his position
as president, the mainland would have no objection to that. When the
U.S. government refused to bow to Chinese pressure and issued
President Lee a travel visa over Beijing's objections, denunciations of
the U.S. government and President Lee were broadcast nationally on
Chinese television and radio, and angry diatribes against Taiwan and
the United States were plastered all over public buildings and college
campuses. Matters worsened somewhat when the government
claimed to discern hints of Taiwanese independence in his speech
and lodged the usual and very predictable accusations of U.S.
behind-the-scenes complicity in the entire affair. The government's
anti-American and anti-Lee Teng-hui propaganda appeared on bulle-
tin boards and blackboards all over the campus of Nanjing University
in mainland China. A few people angrily confronted American stu-
dents about this and wanted to argue about it, but the vast majority
of Chinese students on the campus found the entire matter a laughable
tempest in a teacup and paid it no mind. They had come to expect
these paranoid antics by the government, it seemed, and they were
largely cynical and dismissive of them. The mainland government,
however, took the entire affair very seriously and indefinitely sus-
pended national unification talks with Taiwan in protest of Lee's visit
to the United States. This turned out to be a mistake on the mainland's
part because it further increased resentment and suspicion across the
Taiwan Strait and interrupted a once-fruitful dialogue between the
two governments.
In 1996 Taiwan held its first openly democratic and popular election
for the president of the Republic of China. Prior to this time, the
president was appointed by the government; even Lee Teng-hui's
elevation to the presidency upon the death of Chiang Ching-kuo was
the result of succession, not election. Lee Teng-hui had vowed to hold
an open and democratic election for the presidency, and in 1996 this
