China worries about how study in Taiwan might affect its students

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.