From bulwark to model

Ma Ying-jeou won reelection as president of Taiwan this past month; in a broader sense, his win was a great victory for notion of Chinese democracy.

What makes Taiwan's election even more interesting was the impact it had on mainland China. China's Twitter-like wēibó (微博) covered the event extensively, and with such zeal that the official censors just couldn't keep up.

How ironic, then, that we should have a bigger stake in supporting Taiwan now that we did before 1989. Before the 1990s, Taiwan (like South Korea) was an autocratic regime. The KMT Party (國民黨, Kuomintang) dominated the political landscape in the same fashion as most other Cold War-era Western-supported dictatorships.

Back then, in the words of Douglas MacArthur, Taiwan served as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier" in the fight against communism. Now, it serves a new role: the model of democracy for a burgeoning Chinese awareness about multi-party elections.

If Taiwan is to China like West Germany was to the East before unification, we owe it our unwavering support -- not so much as a military ally, but as a partner in exposing the Communist Party's lie that "democracy begets chaos."