Formed in Formosa

China worries about how study in Taiwan might affect its students

But it still allows large numbers to go to universities there

May 9th 2019 | TAINAN

SIPPING ICED coffee at a trendy restaurant in Tainan, a city in southern Taiwan, Li Jiabao appears calm despite the attention the 20-year-old student’s outspoken views have recently attracted on the island’s campuses. Mr Li is a student of pharmacy from the eastern Chinese province of Shandong. In March he released a startling self-recorded video in which he denounced China’s decision, unveiled about a year ago, to scrap the ten-year term limit for the presidency. He compared China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, to an “emperor”. Most Chinese students in Taiwan keep quiet about politics at home. But Mr Li says living in Taiwan’s “model democracy” inspired him to speak out. Last month he applied for political asylum there.

Liberal thinkers in China have long been fascinated by Taiwan’s politics because of the island’s close cultural and historical links with the mainland. At the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949, the defeated Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalist Party, took refuge on the island and ruled it with the same contempt for democracy that the victorious Communist Party displayed in China. But Taiwan succeeded economically, producing a middle class that began pushing for reform. Eventually, in 1996, Taiwan held its first democratic presidential election. The KMT won but the next time, four years later, it was defeated.

FORMOSA：福尔摩沙来自拉丁文及葡萄牙文的“Formosa”，意为“美丽”之意。福尔摩沙并不是台湾的意思，福尔摩沙的意思是美丽之岛。绿岛很美是福尔摩沙，马祖很美也是福尔摩沙。 1554年，“福尔摩沙”之岛名，首先出现在葡萄牙制图家罗伯欧蒙（ Lopo Homem）所绘制的世界地图上，这是目前所知的最早的由欧洲人所绘制的、出现台湾岛名的地图。