Chen Shui-bian

He is held at a detention center in Tucheng, south of the city, for about half a year.

Among the other men locked up there in that season is a young opposition politician named Chen Shui-bian, who will one day be elected president of Taiwan.

History has a way of seating people side by side before anyone knows why.

The months pass behind walls.

Qi is arrested.

He is held at a detention center in Tucheng, south of the city, for about half a year.

Among the other men locked up there in that season is a young opposition politician named Chen Shui-bian, who will one day be elected president of Taiwan.

History has a way of seating people side by side before anyone knows why.

Oh.

And that in- that involved, for example, such prima facie things as we had to dispatch our ambassador, or Doug Paal, who was our representative in Taipei- To disabuse Chen Shui-bian, the then leader of Taiwan, of what Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had just told him, which was have a independence referendum and piss off Beijing.

We'll be there.

We go disabuse him of that afterwards, and thank God CSB listened to us, and finally Bush rebuked, just flat out rebuked CSB for even talking about a referendum.

And we have seen this in the past historically.

Back in 2003, President George W. Bush openly rebuked Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan's leader at the time, for attempting to unilaterally change the status quo.

And fast forward to 2017, President Donald Trump, during his first term, reaffirmed the standard one China policy language after his initial phone call with Tsai Ing-wen and other Taiwan leaders at the time.

That rattle really unnerved Beijing at the time.

It represents a case of what I call explicit affirmative linkage.

So that is the linkage strategy in the most visible form.

During this period, the second North Korean nuclear crisis basically coincided with Beijing's deepening anxiety about Chen Shui-bian's independence moves on Taiwan.

So China considerably stepped up its pressure on North Korea and played a leading role in six-party talks and sought to trade those cooperation efforts for U.S. restraint on Chen Shui-bian.

Starts off with an earthquake on the very first day of my planned travels, huge earthquake.

And then I've sort of wrapped up all my travels for the book in early 2000 with the historic election of Chen Shui-bian, the first transfer of power.

So you weren't blessed with such acts of God, were you? No.

Well, I don't know if it was an act of God, but I guess I was blessed with gain-of-function research.

The constitution was running and had been reformed for Taiwan, and it was beginning to really stick.

And then I think that the kind of the, the final real capstone on all that was when Chen Shui-bian won the presidency in, uh, in 2000, and there was the first peaceful transfer of power.

And I think, you know, it was a gradual process, and different people decided that it was all real and wasn't gonna go away at different times.

But by the end of that decade, I think people were like, "All right, it's really here, and it's, it's, it's gonna-- this is how it's gonna be."

Chen Shui-bian was part of the DPP party, and I think the term used in Taiwan to broadly capture these political views is pan-green.

If, if we look at the average opinion in the, the pan-green part of Taiwan today, how do they look back at Lee Teng-hui, in your opinion?

I, I have to update your vocabulary a little bit because in recent years, while the newspapers still say the green camp, 绿, 绿营 or, or pan-green, 泛绿, uh, the, the people on that side of the political spectrum these days increasingly refer to themselves as 台派, which means sort of the Taiwan faction, which is kind of interesting because there's recognition that, that they're not the only ones in, in Taiwan.

But, but leadership does really matter, and it, it's really clear in Taiwan.

Since former first daughter Chen Xinyu loves Snoopy, people said the temple should invite her to visit, and they liked the idea.

Chen Shui-bian's daughter? She should come and see.

Snoopy has brought renewed fame to this 200-year-old temple, as people discover he's been hidden there for over 20 years.

A young man with a broken leg sits in a wheelchair, sharing what happened in his recent accident.