Undoutedly Taiwan politics is messy becasue the society is going through transformation (like any societies new to democracy -- Korea, Philippines, Thailand). However, Taiwan never resort to coup (people's power, military coup or church intervention) to topple any legally elected politicians. This is one major step ahead of the those that required revolutions but claimed to be democratic.
Shen Fu Xiong was nominated by Ma for the position of 监查院长 （equivalent to head of internal affairs to discipline senior government officers; a minister level position). He was not voted in by the KMT legislators because these people were "disciples" of other KMT seniors (e.g. Lian Zhan 连战) and were not happy with Ma idealogy and "disrespect" for old power. That is one of the reasons why Ma needs to become the KMT Chairman so that he would be able to manage his party's cadres and the KMT dominated legislative yuan (立法院)。
For those Sporeans who slammed Taiwan for sucking up to US and China, they should look at Singapore. Not only did Spore suck up to both in big ways (and I agree that Spore should) the country get screwed from time to time (e.g. Suzhou, Tianjin Eco City, Iraq war).
Taiwan is definitely not a renegade province of People's Repulic of China (PROC or Mainland China). The island was given to Japanese during Qing Dynasty (清朝)，and the USA took it over from Japan and passed it on to Jiang Jie Shi (蒋介石)， the President of Republic of China during the 2nd world war (about 1944 or 1945). PROC only came into being on 1949 Oct 1. Have you ever seen a younger fellow being the father of an older person?
As I mentioned earlier, Taiwan's software leads their hardware. It is a gem is disguised.
If you examined properly, almost every Mandarin pop songs have some Taiwan elements in it. Elements I mean things such as: lyrics, melody, singer, producer -- the guy who directs and guide the singer in the singing, recording and music arrangement --, band, and album production company. Whether the songs were sang by mainland Chinese, Singaporean, Hongkie, Taiwanese or Malaysian, they were likely to have one or more of those elements by Taiwanese. It is amazing that they managed to champion the contemporary Chinese culture while being the only one preserving the traditional Chinese culture (mainland has lost it over the Cultural revolution). Taiwanese also write many good books even today.
Their variety shows are great. Spore would be happy to have 1 Jack Wu, and they have several including famous ones like 桃子，胡瓜，張飛 and etc. Their commedians are very funny too, I love watching their 全民最大黨。
Not many noticed that Taiwan filed the most patents in the world every year; yes more than US. That's because they have very good combination of engineering and entrepreneurship. TSMC and UMC were laughing their ways to the banks every quarter while Chartered Semi Con was bleeding. The country is also the world largest laptop producer, one of the top 2 LED producers, mid-range to high-end bicycle producer (including for ferrari and BMW), producer for iPOD and iPad and have great software capability. Don't forget that before the Indian, Taiwanese made up 20% of Silicon Valley population.
Their parliament and legislative yuan have the most PhD holder ratio in the world. There is no lack of talents. Mant thought the fights in the legisative yuan is a shame, and I agreed, but those are like wrestling matches -- shows. It started during the time when the media was completely under control of KMT during the Jiang family era. The opposition figured out that they would only get media coverage if they fought, so that their points and opinion would be aired. The tradition carried over to today.
Like Mr Brown who discovered with his family, the service quality and food are great in Taiwan.
Since the news that both of them are an item, she stopped talking about Christianity and virginity.
