Taipei: As Taiwan celebrates its national day, the perennial talk of its political future with China will be a subject of conversation among the 400 foreign dignitaries gathered for the ceremonies in Taipei today.
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This time, the fate of Chinese democracy in Hong Kong will add a fresh urgency to the talk among guests. At stake is whether Taiwan can balance its desire for closer economic ties with China against its wish to remain a sovereign political state, free of Beijing's meddling.
Taiwan's President Ma Ying-jeou has pledged that his country won't become "another Hong Kong" even as his government awaits the ratification of a controversial services trade deal with China.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs director-general of international information Manfred P. T. Peng was even more blunt this week when asked about the prospects of Taiwan succumbing to China's political will.
"If you compare Taiwan with Hong Kong you are underestimating Taiwan's position," he said. The government of the Republic of China (Taiwan's official name) was established on the mainland in 1912, he said, and "stayed a sovereign country" when it relocated to Taiwan at the end of China's civil war in 1949.
Unlike Hong Kong, Taipei manages its own external affairs and has its own military, he said.
Surveys show that about 80 per cent of Taiwanese people want to maintain the status quo in relations with China. Yet China's president Xi Jinping said last year that the political solution with Taiwan should not be postponed forever.
Legal scholar Huang Kuo-chang says what's happening in Hong Kong, which was politically reunited with China in 1997, should serve as a warning.
"We have to think about what will happen when our economy becomes more and more dependent on China," he said.
Taiwan's exports to China have grown from a mere 3 per cent in 2000 to nearly 27 per cent last year, while 17 per cent of Taiwan's imports come from China.
Professor Huang believes the President's ruling party, the Kuomintang, wants to one day become part of China. Activists in the Sunflower Movement, including Professor Huang, occupied Taiwan's parliament in March to halt the ratification of the Cross Strait Services Trade Agreement with China, the latest of 20 such pacts between Taipei and Beijing since 2008.
Taiwan modernised in the 1960s and 70s and today has 23 million inhabitants, many fewer than the 1.3 billion people in China, which is undergoing a historic transformation into a regional, if not global superpower.
Yet amid long-held expectations in China and elsewhere that Beijing would eventually reclaim what it sees as a renegade province - peacefully or otherwise - Taiwan has quietly pursued its own path, embracing democracy, the rule of a law and a vibrant free media.
US-based China researcher Daniel Blumenthal, writing in Foreign Policy, describes a growing divide between the people of the two Chinas.
"As economic ties have expanded, the Taiwanese feel an ever stronger sense of uniqueness," he wrote, earlier this year. "The more contact the Taiwanese have with China, the more they feel different from the Chinese."
Nevertheless, with China's rise reshaping the global economy, Taiwan isolating itself from China would be a recipe for economic struggle, something Taiwan's President Ma is no doubt aware of.
How successfully Mr Ma, and indeed Taiwan, can navigate the glaring contradictions will be the major issue of Taiwan in the years ahead. It will certainly be the talk of the assembled dignitaries in Taipei today.
Chris Zappone travelled to Taiwan as a guest of the Taiwanese government.
