Samstag, 24. März 2007
Dienstag, 6. März 2007
The Ghost in the Buddha Machine
FM3 is American-born, expat musician, Christiaan Virant, and Chinese keyboardist and computer musician, Zhang Jian. For the past six years, the Beijing-based duo has been making meditative, quietly minimal music, employing a mix of electronics, computers, and traditional Chinese instruments. Although FM3 has published a smattering of enticingly soporific releases on CDrs and compilations on Western labels, such as Staalplaat and Bip-Hop, and have toured Europe, the group has retained a somewhat enigmatic air, which was only heightened by a general ignorance in the West of the electronic music scene in China.
This year Virant and Jiang released their most unusual record to date, a portable, hardware loop-player containing nine short loops of FM3 music called the Buddha Machine. This fetching little lo-fi electronic fetish-object has become something of a mini-mini-rage among those seeking sonic enlightenment, fueled at least in part by the ardor of some bloggers and online music critics. Yet, in spite of the attention paid to the box itself, the musicians behind the machine remain a bit of a mystery. I spoke by phone with FM3’s Christiaan Virant on Tuesday, November 1, while he and Jian were on tour in Berlin, and he shed some light on FM3, electronic music in China, the Buddha Machine, and more.
This is the transcript of the interview (with minor edits at the beginning), which aired on Thursday, November 3, 2005 on WZBC 90.3 FM Newton.
Your most recent release is something called the Buddha Machine. I imagine that most of my listeners have not seen it, heard it, or held one in their hands. Could you explain what one is exactly?
[laughs] The Buddha Machine is really nothing more than a small, plastic box. I guess about the size of a cigarette package in the U.S., which I think fewer and fewer people are familiar with in the U.S.; but it’s a small, plastic box that comes in six different colors and inside the box are loops that my band made over the last six years that we edited down, compressed into six-bit audio, and burned onto a chip that’s at the heart of this box. As I said, it’s about the size of a cigarette pack and it also contains a speaker, much like the transistor radios that we grew up with in the seventies before digital media became the new wave. But you turn on the box with two AA batteries inside, it’s powered, and the loops start to play, so essentially it’s a portable, go-anywhere, loop-playing sound system.
And these are also things, I understand, that are sold at Buddhist monasteries, hence the name Buddha Machine?
Yes, yes. The original Buddha Machine—we actually gave it the name Buddha Machine—the original box was used at Buddhist temples to chant, or play prayers and there are a number of different explanations of why they invented this box in China. Some people say it’s because modern people are too lazy to go to the temples to say the chants to the Buddha like they used to, so they invented this small machine to do it for them. Other people say it’s because there are fewer and fewer Buddhist monks out there. In the old days, the number of Buddhist monks was much higher, because that was considered a very high-class profession, and now more and more people are going into business or whatnot, so there are less monks to do the chanting for the Buddha, so they made a small box to do it in the place of a human.
What attracted you about using such a machine?
Actually, that’s a really good question. My group, FM3 or FM “tsan”—“tsan” is the Chinese pronunciation for the number three—my group has been working in China for a number of years with the concept of minimalist, repetitive sounds. We’ve played either with Chinese instruments or with electronics entire sets of single loops playing over and over, generating essentially one or two hours of music. And it was about ten years ago that I first saw one of these chant boxes at a Buddhist temple in China and for the past ten years, I’ve been interested. I thought, “Wow, what an amazing release that would be, if I could put my music into that box and then release it as a cd, or a cassette, or an album.” It took a few years to do it, but we eventually found a factory that agreed and that’s why we have the Buddha Machine.
The people at the factory must have been rather surprised by the proposal? I imagine you were the first person to propose such a thing.
At first they were annoyed by us, because of course the factories that make these things make tens of thousands of them for Buddhist temples around the world and we came to them and said we wanted to make about a hundred fifty to two hundred of these little boxes and they said, "Oh, go away, go away. Don’t even bother us with this." But after they heard the music and realized that it was actually quite a fun project for them for them because they never thought of turning what they saw as a sort of a Buddhist product into essentially what’s become a piece of sound art, or a portable piece of sound art, the factory kind of took to the idea and then they helped us with it. It took a couple years’ of convincing, but now they’re pretty much on board and they’re quite tickled with how popular it’s become.
I want to back up a bit, since you alluded to when you talked about the origins of FM (san), is that how it’s pronounced?
FM tsan, or FM3 is fine.
My Chinese pronunciation is probably pretty appalling. You mentioned that you come from the States originally, from Nebraska, I believe. I was curious how you ended up in China, because you’ve been in China for 17 years now, which is quite a long stretch.
Yeah, well, I was born and raised and grew up in Nebraska, and then in my teens, I was from a very young age studying music, classical mostly, violin and piano; and then, in the 1980s, I became a young punk and was playing in punk bands in Omaha. And, at that time, I also became interested in Indian music, mostly the sitar, and also Chinese music—basically anything that was weird for Nebraska, I was into at the time. I ended up applying for and receiving a scholarship to go study in China and this was in the 1980s, and I went to a wonderfully beautiful coastal city in southern China. It was warm year round, had great seafood and it was just beautiful. It had palm trees and green everywhere and coming from winter in Nebraska, I thought it was the best place on earth. So, I eventually just got stuck there and by the time I realized what I was doing, it was ten years later and I was still in China. It just kind of became my home.
And how did you get involved in making electronic music? Was there an electronic music scene that you just plugged in to?
Really, in effect, I, or my band, started the electronic music scene in Beijing. When I was very young in Nebraska, in the early eighties, I was working with electronics—I think a lot of people were at that time—using electronic keyboards and any second hand gear we could get our hands on. And that side of me kind of stayed dormant for many many years in China, because there was just no access to materials and no interest. Mostly, in China, I was playing in punk bands again. I was essentially playing the same kind of music that I was playing in my teens, but I was in my thirties. At one point, I said, you know, I used to do a lot of electronics, I should really start a band in Beijing, because at that time, there was no one doing it and so I got some friends together from different bands that I had been in and we just went for it. The idea was that we would try to do live computer improvisation on stage and, fortunately, the people that I chose to work with were all really good musicians and at first it was a bit sketchy, but over the years we started to make it happen and became quite a popular group in Beijing and spawned a bit of an electronic music craze around the nation.
Now FM3 is just you and one other musician or is it more fluid?
That’s correct. Originally, the band was three people, and very shortly after we started in 1999, very shortly after that, one of our members became a solo artist and is now one of the top dj, laptop performers in China. FM3 is myself and my partner Zhang Jian and he’s a keyboard player from down south and he also does a lot of film and theater composition, he does a lot of classical scoring. That’s one reason that our music has a very Chinese folk and Chinese classical influences, because he brings this background to the group.
Did you start or did you begin to develop this very minimal, ambient sound with the group right away?
Actually, when we started out our first gigs were minimal techno gigs. There were three of us and we were playing mostly clubs in China, we were playing the back rooms of clubs, where we played much more minimal—in China the dominant club music is very fast trance or very, very fast techno and we played a bit slower, much more minimal, stripped-down music and, then, eventually, we just started leaving out the beats entirely. And that’s when, and this was probably in the year 2001, when we went entirely without any—some would say “groove”—I would say, “rhythm” and became an ambient band.
How big is the scene in China now—can you talk of a coherent electronic music scene, or are there more discrete pockets of activity?
Well, you know if you had asked me this question just two years ago, I would have been able to tell you every single band that was active in China, but in the past two years, it’s just exploded and now there are just hundreds of kids all around the nation, in really far-flung places in China, that are experimenting with electronic music. And it’s mostly because, in China, access to computers is very easy. Of course, most of the world’s hardware is made in China and, as we all know, most of the world’s software is cracked in China, so you have, for young kids, easy access to hardware and free access to software and, as we all know, most music is made using software. So you have millions of young kids with free musical interests. Literally, in the last couple of years, the electronic music scene in China has gone from a handful of people based in Beijing or in Shanghai, to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of kids all around the nation. It’s really hard to give you an accurate picture of what’s happening, but one of the newest trends in China currently is breakcore, or the very frenzied, kind of punk rock computer beats that you’re hearing in Tokyo or in London or in New York.
I was curious also, is there a lot of crossover between experimental music, breakcore and more commercial dance music, you mention the sped-up trance music, between these different activities or are these very much separate now?
Well, it’s always been very separate. And I, I come from a musical background, a punk rock background, so I’ll play any gig, any time, anywhere, because I love to play. But the dance scene and the electronic music scene in China have always been very separate and FM3 was actually one of the few groups that was able to play any club gigs. I don’t think we’ve played a club gig in I don’t know how many years now and there are still very few Chinese electronic artists playing in clubs. The clubs are still dominated by djs playing vinyl or playing cds and you rarely see a live Chinese dance act or Chinese techno act. Most of the electronic music artists play in what in the U.S. would be considered rock bars, where mostly the programming is rock and roll and then one night a week is given over to electronic music. And the breakcore kids tend to avoid the commercial clubs, because they’re targeting a much younger, grittier audience of college kids that doesn’t really have the money to go to the commercial clubs and doesn’t really want to be associated with that scene. So, the breakcore kids have built their own scene and they’ll just rent their own bar for the weekend and they’ll just have their party there.
And are there Chinese record labels? I noticed that you have releases on labels like Staalplaat, and on the French label Bip-Hop’s compilations, but do you also release records on Chinese labels?
There are a number of very small Chinese labels, because China is still very much culturally under the control of the Communist authorities. Economically and politically, China is liberalizing a lot, as I’m sure people in the United States know, but culturally it’s still very, very strictly controlled and performances and record releases and newspapers and news media are all much more controlled than would be in a free media market, which means there are a lot small Chinese labels, but they’re not able to come up above the underground. Usually what happens is a couple of kids will start a label, they’ll make a compilation, they’ll make one release and that’s it, that’s as far as it goes. So there are hundreds of these CDr or, what I call, one-release labels that release one disc and that’s it. But most of the official labels like the recognized government labels don’t deal with this stuff at all, because they only deal with mainstream pop music or mainstream classical music.
Are there any compilations that are available, say, if listeners are interested in finding out more or listening more to Chinese music? Do you have any suggestions?
One label that I can recommend is run by a friend of mine, his artist name is Panda Twin, and he runs a label called Shanshui Records. And I believe if you search for Shanshui.com or Shanshui Records in Google, you’ll be able to find this label and it’s a very small Beijing-based label and it does excellent compilations of underground, breakcore, ambient and electronic musicians from all around China.
I was curious, since you mentioned the cultural restrictions that still exist in China, was there any resistance to—is the Buddha Machine even something that’s available in China, or would something with name “Buddha” on it raise some kind of flag?
No, not really. The Buddha Machine is available in China and if people are interested, they can order it from us in China. We don’t have distribution for it in China, because it’s hard to distribute things like this in China, not because of any government regulations, but just simply because there isn’t a distribution network for small things like that that aren’t mainstream and aren’t like one million, two million units a day type distribution. There isn’t really a small type of network to distribute this. So there is no problem at all with that. Of course, you know these Buddhist machines exist as Buddhist chanting devices already in China and there’s not a problem with that, and our music is much less sensitive, or offensive than that, so there should be no problem with it at all.
I understand that there’s going to be a series of Buddha machines with various different artists. Are there going to be any Chinese artists or international electronic musicians?
You know, I don’t—there is not going to be a series of Buddha Machines for other artists in the future! [laughs] I don’t know how that became kind of a common—I see it in a lot of reviews and a lot of mentions on the web about the Buddha Machine. No, we made the Buddha Machine as our release for 2005 and in 2006, we’re going to go back to making regular music for regular record labels in Europe and China. This is essentially a limited edition idea for us and there aren’t any plans to release any other artists on the box.
You are currently on tour in Germany and the Netherlands?it’s just you solo?
No, no. If I can, I tour with the other half of FM3, Zhang Jian. Last year, we did a very long, six-month tour in Europe and, then, I also came out on tour solo for four months and then this time, we are on tour as a duo for just over a month in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and, I think that’s it. Yeah, that’s it, just Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands this time.
Are there any plans to possibly come to the States anytime soon?
Well, I’d love to. I played solo last year in Chicago of all places and had a really good time and now that Buddha Machine has really taken off in the U.S., and our current live set consists entirely of Buddha Machines, that’s all we play now, we don’t play with laptops, we essentially play with mixers and Buddha Machines, I think the U.S. audience would really like this set. The plans are, if we can make it work, sometime early next year. One of the problems would be getting a visa for Zhang Jian, and he’s travelled a lot in Europe and the UK, so it shouldn’t be much of an issue, but there are occasional visa problems to work out.
One other thing, which is sort of a side issue, I understand that you were a curator/compiler of the Radio Pyonyang release (on Sublime Frequencies).
[laughs] Ah, yes, yes.
Did you actually travel to North Korea, or is something using radio broadcasts, cassettes…
No, no. I was actually in North Korea, but I didn’t go to North Korea to do that disc. It would have actually been quite nice to go to North Korea specifically to do that disc. The way that worked out was that we did the Tibetan field recordings for the label Sublime Frequencies in the U.S. and we released that earlier this year. While I was working on the Tibet disc, I mentioned to the head of that label, “Well, I was in North Korea about ten years ago, and I have a bunch of recordings that I made from then.” I didn’t know if he’d be interested, but he said, “Yeah, go for it.” So, the way that disc came about was essentially many, many years after I’d been to North Korea already. So, what I had to do was I had to rely on friends that were recently there or archive material or radio intercepts and whatnot and kind of build a sound collage of my impressions of North Korea from I guess it would have been the early 1990s
Had you been there just that one time? Or have you been there…
No, I’ve only been to North Korea once. It’s very, very difficult for U.S. citizens to go to North Korea.
I would imagine so. I was surprised—I thought you had been there, but just how you had done it….
Yeah, it’s very difficult, because North Korea doesn’t really want you there and the U.S. doesn’t really want you to go, so you have pressure from both sides. I have a number of friends from Beijing, who go quite often to Beijing either for their jobs or because they’re just kind of extreme, adventure-seeking weirdos and they’re able to bring me back sound recordings on almost a monthly basis, so those are the people I relied on mostly for the trip. I’d love to go back, but it’s actually very, very expensive. You can do it, if you’re a U.S. citizen, but you have to go through an approved tour operator and it’s kind of like going to the Soviet Union back in the days when it was the Soviet Union, it costs many thousands of U.S. dollars and they only take you for a couple of days or so.
Well thank you very much for doing this interview. With that I will conclude the interview.
Well, thank you, yes.
As a practical matter, we’re in charge
The Chinese economy may be racing into the 21st century, but the political system remains another beast altogether.
The dense, 35 page-long speech delivered by Wen Jiabao, the premier, to the National People’s Congress on Monday was full of both paeans to past Communist leaders and the power of the capitalist marketplace, with nods along the way to both the benefits of Chinese tradition and the need to catch up to the west.
Observer’s man in Beijing was particularly taken by what Wen said was the party’s “conclusion”, reached after much “practical” experience.
“We must free our minds, follow a realistic and practical approach, keep pace with the times, work hard with a pioneering and innovative spirit, unswervingly take the road of Chinese socialism, adhere to the reform and opening-up policy, pursue development according to scientific principles, maintain social harmony and ensure peaceful development.”
Only then, he said, could China achieve its objective of modernisation.
Translated, we think that means pretty much anything goes, policy-wise, as long as the Communist party retains full control of the political system.
Excellent timing
You have to admire Rick Sherlund’s sense of timing. Or perhaps admire isn’t the right word – maybe envy is.
Sherlund was a young analyst at Goldman Sachs in 1986 when a software company from Seattle called Microsoft first sold its shares to the public. Sherlund was able to make a very nice career for himself recommending that investors buy shares of Microsoft.
Not that it was always easy. Sherlund followed the battles for dominance in the technology industry – Apple’s battle with the personal computer giants, the rise of Lotus, the emergence of Oracle and, of course, Microsoft – at Goldman for the next 25 years, and it was not always clear who would come out the winner. (More recently, he has covered another hot new company, Google.)
He was named a Goldman partner in 1994. Goldman went public itself in 1999, which worked out well financially for Sherlund.
Now Sherlund is moving into another hot sector – hedge funds. He worked his last day at Goldman last week and is to become a managing director at Galleon Group, a $6.5bn hedge fund. Sherlund will manage – what else? – a portfolio of technology stocks.
Eye on the kite
As if taking money and knowing the route weren’t enough to cope with, bus drivers in north-east England are adding a new skill – bird-spotting.
A local bus operator, Go North East, has launched a “red kite” bus service to run through Gateshead’s Derwent Valley, where the once locally extinct species has been successfully reintroduced in recent years.
Drivers have been sent for “kite awareness training” so they can point out the birds to passengers and impart information about them as the bus trundles from Newcastle to Consett. In case the passengers are not familiar with the birds of prey – which have a 5ft wing span and a distinctive forked tail – the buses have been repainted with pictures of the kites on their sides and fitted with the latest emissions technology.
Red kites used to be common birds but were all but wiped out in the 19th century when they were regarded as a threat to livestock.
Efforts to re-establish colonies of the birds have done well in Wales, and it is rare not to see some on a drive along the M40 motorway around Stokenchurch, south England.
The Northern Kites Project brought the birds to the region in 2004, and is the first to have introduced the species so close to a large urban area.
Last year red kite chicks hatched in the area for the first time in nearly 200 years – an event Keith Bowey, the project’s manager, could not resist calling a “feather in the region’s cap”.
No secrets
As the long march towards the campaign for the 2008 US presidential elections begins, it is already looking like YouTube is going to have a major impact on how the campaigns are waged.
Not very long ago, the memory of a comment made at an obscure weekend conference could have been papered over by the time people picked up their Monday morning papers.
But that is not the case now, as Ann Coulter, a poison-tongued conservative columnist and author, has learnt.
On Friday, Coulter called John Edwards, a candidate for the Democratic party’s nomination, a “faggot” at the Conservative Political Action conference in Washington.
Newspapers carried the story of Coulter’s use of the term during the weekend. But a video clip of Coulter’s speech was among the most popular on YouTube on Monday.
Edwards, however, was able to take advantage of Coulter’s remark – which was denounced by all the Republican candidates.
He posted a video of Coulter’s comments, using it to ask supporters to raise $100,000 in “Coulter Cash” for his campaign to “fight back against the politics of bigotry”.
Patrick Walker, Google’s head of video partnerships, described the power of this phenomenon at a conference on Monday.
Walker described the ability of a “billion people able to access such clips as this and Saddam’s hanging” – the most popular in YouTube’s history – as a “videocracy”.
Wrong document
Observer got its US history wrong last week in an item about Wales. It said that Thomas Jefferson, though a fluent Welsh speaker, chose to write the US constitution in English.
As some readers pointed out, Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, not the US constitution. James Madison was the chief author of the constitution.
China's rural millions left behind
| By Rupert Wingfield-Hayes BBC News, Beijing |
In Britain people tend to think of the countryside as a rural idyll, a bucolic landscape of green fields and happy folk. 
In China, if they can, people try not to think about the countryside at all.
When they do, it is not of a rural idyll, but a grim, dirty place where people are poor and life is harsh.
In Britain the countryside is somewhere to escape to. In China it is somewhere to escape from.
China's urban population has a strong tendency to look down on country folk. The word for "farmer" in Chinese has a distinctly pejorative flavour.
"Rural people are of a very low quality" is a phrase you often hear in Beijing.
And rural people are not just treated like second class citizens, they are.
Almost everything in the countryside is worse than in the cities, according to popular belief.
People say the schools are bad, the teachers awful; there are very few doctors, and hardly any clinics or hospitals; local communist party officials are invariably corrupt, and often abuse their power for personal gain.
In the last decade, two things have happened to make the tension between the city and the countryside worse.
Urban shift
One is that the countryside has begun moving to the city. Between 100 and 150 million Chinese peasants have quit their villages and headed to the cities to look for work.
The second is that the city is moving to the countryside. As China's urban centres boom they are gobbling up farmland at a voracious rate. A total of 16 million acres (6,475,000 hectares) have gone in the last 20 years.
The tens of millions who have moved to the cities find themselves treated like second class citizens there too. In a system akin to South Africa's apartheid, people born in rural China find it almost impossible to become full urban residents.
They are denied access to urban housing and to urban schooling for their children. Work is found in factories or on construction sites. Life is a tenuous, hand-to-mouth existence.
Last year the Chinese internet buzzed with the story of a rural migrant from north-west China sentenced to death for a brutal double murder. The man had stabbed his victims to death during a fight at a construction site. The argument began when he went to claim back-wages. It turned out the man had not been paid for two years.
Land grab
The only security these rural migrants enjoy is their piece of land back in their village.
But that too is now under threat.
In China, agricultural land is owned communally. In theory each village owns the land around it. Each family holds its bit of land on a long term lease.
Farmland used to be almost worthless. But as China's cities expand it is now in high demand.
What happened to the village of Yangge, on the edge of Beijing, is typical.
Yangge sits along a picturesque river 25km north of the city centre. It is just the sort of area in which Beijing's wealthy new middle class might like to own a spacious suburban villa.
That is exactly what a Beijing property developer thought. He paid several million dollars to acquire the land from the local township government. The villagers were never consulted, and they saw none of the money.
Now, less than 100m from the village, rows of huge new American-style homes are rising out of the fields. A thousand are to be built. The asking price - close to $1m each.
All over China land disputes like this are turning violent.
Late last year three people were shot dead by police in southern Guangdong province during a violent protest against another land seizure. Villagers said the number killed was closer to 20.
The anger and bitterness emanating from China's countryside is not so much about poverty, as about fairness.
People see their land being taken from them and then turned into $1m-homes. They see local officials lining their own pockets, while the villagers get nothing. They spend years away from home working on construction sites and in Dickensian factories, only to be cheated of their wages by unscrupulous bosses.
This week Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao promised to bring prosperity to China's countryside. But without fundamental change in the way China works, its 700 million peasant farmers will remain second class citizens.
BBC News
China's parliament opens with a blast of lusty pride.
The national anthem plays to 3,000 delegates.
Then there is a touch of public humility.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao gets up onto the stage and makes a bow so deep it even comes with its own name, the 90 degree bow.
It is his signal that the Chinese government is ready to listen to what its people and its parliament have to say.
But just outside, the people are nowhere to be seen.
Police informers
Tiananmen Square is almost empty. Rows of policemen standing under Chinese flags stop anyone from getting close.
In the past few days, China has rounded up and jailed those most desperate to be heard, petitioners who need the state's help.
For centuries, Chinese citizens have come from across the country to throw themselves at the emperor's feet, begging to be heard.
In a country without elections, it is often the only way anyone get can noticed.
But now that the parliament is in session, China wants to make sure that petitioners do not get in the way.
At night, we drive in search of some of those who have managed to avoid arrest.
We soon realise we are not the only ones out looking.
The roads are full of police cars, some sent in from the provinces to track down local petitioners who have come to Beijing.
We stop near a set of houses and alleyways known as the petitioners' village. Right now, it is heavily patrolled by police.
We head into the alleyway on foot, careful to avoid police informers, known here as "dogs".
We make it into one small house and find a group of petitioners standing quietly.
They barely make a sound. They do not want to let the police know they are around.
Local corruption
Several men begin to hold out their petitions, 50 or 60 pages of documents. Each one lists years of struggle.
Wei Shoujin has spent 37 years fighting without success for a proper pension.
"Last night before dinner, we heard there were going to be some big searches," he says.
"We all ran off. I stayed outside till one in the morning. But they started another raid at three. The police broke into the house, they broke down the doors and windows. I rushed to climb out of the window and I hid under a box."
Rei Jiancai has spent a decade campaigning against local corruption. He holds up his petition as he speaks.
"I've been tortured three times," he says. "My wife is being held in a labour camp. But I can't give up."
Yu Changren sits in a corner. For the past 18 years he has been trying to persuade the government to get his wages paid. He points to a gap in his teeth.
"Last time, I was beaten up and I lost one of my teeth," he says. "It was right outside the State Petition Office. Four or five people dragged me out of the queue and beat me up."
Heading into the cold
Still, no-one in this room is ready to give up. There is nothing else they can try. During his years of petitioning, Zhang Yajun has lost everything but his hope.
"We still believe in the Chinese Communist Party," he says. "We still have faith in this country and the central government.
"Both President Hu [Jintao] and Premier Wen say they are going to build a harmonious society and a harmonious relationship between the party and the ordinary people. But where is this harmony? I don't see it."
The petitioners point to the bed of another petitioner, he was dragged out at three in the morning.
He did not even have time to collect his belongings, which are left in two plastic bags hanging on the wall.
Then, late at night, everyone heads out into the cold.
No-one wants to get caught and be beaten in another overnight raid. So, the petitioners will wander around the streets till dawn.
Their government says it wants to listen. But right now, those who have the most to say do not get heard.BBC News, Beijing
US Role
The relationship, forged during World War II and the Cold War, underwent its sternest test in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter ended US diplomatic recognition of Taiwan in order to concentrate on burgeoning ties with China. The US Congress, responding to the move, passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which promises to supply Taiwan with defensive weapons, and stressed that any attack by China would be considered of "grave concern" to the US.
Since then, US policy has been described as one of "strategic ambiguity", seeking to balance China's emergence as a regional power with US admiration for Taiwan's economic success and democratisation.
The US' pivotal role was most clearly shown in 1996, when China conducted provocative missile tests to try and influence Taiwan's first direct presidential election. In response, US President Bill Clinton ordered the biggest display of US military power in Asia since the Vietnam War, sending ships to the Taiwan Strait, and a clear message to Beijing.
The incident may have alerted Washington to the risk it faced of having to fight someone else's war. Two years later President Clinton pledged "three nos" - no to Taiwan independence, no to two Chinas, and no to Taiwan joining international organisations that need statehood for membership.
The administration of George W Bush has appeared more hawkish, even describing China as a "strategic competitor". But it has remained careful not to encourage Taiwan's President Chen Shui-bian, warning him against any actions which risked altering the status quo.
Independence debate
This stance seriously alarmed China, which saw its "one China" policy under threat. Beijing repeatedly warned that any declaration of independence by Taiwan would be a justification for war.
The DPP goal was put on hold when its candidate, Chen Shui-bian, won the 2000 presidential election. Perhaps hoping for a breakthrough with Beijing, he immediately announced that, so long as China did not use force, he would not declare independence.
But China refused to deal with President Chen, who responded by calling for - and getting passed - a referendum law. He promised not to use the law to poll people on the island's status. But its passage infuriated Beijing, who saw it as another move towards independence, and also as a further complication for persuading Taiwan to reunify.
Officially, the DPP still favours eventual independence for Taiwan, while the KMT favours eventual re-unification. Since neither outcome looks likely in the short or even medium term, it is perhaps not surprising that opinion polls suggest most Taiwanese people want things to stay as they are, with the island's ambiguous status unresolved.
Set against that, more and more people say they feel Taiwanese, rather than Chinese, suggesting the independence debate will only get fiercer.