One Saturday last year I was browsing the shelves of a basement book shop in Taipei, my home at the time. Having made a purchase, I was walking up the stairs back to the street when I was confonted by something quite unexpected - quiet. Taipei must rank as one of the world's noisiest cities, with traffc roaring by twenty-four hours a day. But as I stood there, I couldn't see a single car on the road, not one of the ubiquitous yellow taxis, no buses being driven by madmen and not a single scooter.
I quickly realised what had happened. The city was conducting one of its periodic air raid drills in case of aerial attack by China. A siren sounds and the police block off the roads to traffic so that emergency vehicles can move freely. As I'd been in a basement shop, I hadn't heard the siren. It wasn't my first air raid drill so I knew that pedestrians are supposed to stop what they're doing and go indoors.
However, one of the advantages of being a white person in Taiwan is that you can always plead ignorance. So rather cheekily I played dumb and started to wander towards the subway station. The fifth or sixth cop I passed had some English and asked me to "go inside the building, please". So with the station now in sight, I sat down on the step of a department store and whiled away the next few minutes teaching the builders sat next to me how to say "air raid drill" in English.
I thought of this little vignette this week when I heard that the European Union is considering lifting its ban on arms sales to China, which was imposed following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 (by the way, to the guys and gals at BBC World, "massacre" is spelt "m-a-s-s-a-c-r-e", not "c-r-a-c-k-d-o-w-n").
Obviously, having spent two years in Taiwan, I can't help but feel perturbed by this development. The idea of hi-tech European bombs and missiles raining down on my friends in Taipei is not a pleasant one; let alone the thought of the children I used to teach being subjected to such an attack. I don't want the People's Liberation Army to have access to this sophisticated weaponry. If the PLA must point missiles at Taiwan, I want them to be the shittiest missiles known to man, liable to plop harmlessly into the Taiwan Strait. I can't help feeling that missiles made by, for example the Germans, are likely to hit their target.
At a human level I'm against the EU lifting its ban on weapons sales to the People's Republic, but on the political level, I'm not overly concerned about this development. China's "problem" with Taiwan is not military, it is political.
For those who cling tenaciously to the "one China" doctrine, the bad news is that a nascent Taiwanese nationalism is emerging on the island. With each passing year, more of the generation who fled the mainland in 1949 pass away and more young people, who increasingly see themselves as Taiwanese first and foremost, come on to the electoral register.
Back in 2000 when the pan-green (pro-independence) Chen Shui-bian was first elected president, he won only 43% of the vote. He got in because, like Bill Clinton in 1992, he faced two opponents rather than one. In this year's presidential poll, the pan-blue (pro-reunification) parties got their act together and put up a single candidate. But still Chen scraped home winning a fraction over 50% of the poll, seven points better than 2000.
Yesterday's parliamentary election was admittedly a setback for the pan-green parties but even with this, one should remember that the Kuomintang (KMT) is not the party of old. Ma Ying-jeou, the KMT mayor of Taipei and the pan-blue's best chance of winning the presidency in 2008, apparently spends his spare time improving his grasp of the Taiwanese language. He hopes one day to appeal to Taiwanese speakers in the south of the island in their own language. The days of KMT leaders deriding Taiwanese culture are at an end.
The flourishing of Taiwanese nationalism, as evinced by the campaign to change the island's name from "The Republic of China" to "Taiwan", is the real problem which China has to deal with and fancy new missiles from Europe won't do the trick. To paraphrase Bobby Sands, you can't fire a missile at an idea.
China can't unify with Taiwan by raining down death from the skies. But ironically, the regime in Beijing can unify the Taiwanese with each other by pursuing belligerence. Presently, the island is riven by political, ethnic and linguistic cleavages; separating pan-green from pan-blue, mainlander from islander from Aboriginal, Chinese-speker from Taiwanese-speaker from Haka-speaker.
But all these divisions will go out the window the minute the first Chinese missile hits Taiwan. With their country under attack, it would seem inconcievable that the island's people would accept any other label but "Taiwanese". Were there any Republicans or Democrats in New York City on the 12th of September 2001? What did the terms "Labour" and "Conservative" mean in London during the Blitz?
If China's leaders really want some sort of re-unification with Taiwan then they should sit down with the island's democratically elected leader and hammer out a deal. But if they want to push Taiwan towards de jure independence, they should keep up the sabre-rattling; maybe even take out their shiny new sword and take a few swipes.