I think that my emergence as a leader is closely related to the development of Taiwan's democracy. Taiwan's democracy was a gradual development. It was done from the bottom up. Therefore a lot of the more successful political leaders come from civil society, those that are closer to the grass-roots level of the public.

For years, Taiwan has been dominated politically by a single party, the Kuomintang. People now want the place to be more democratic. They want to place more emphasis on human rights and transparency in terms of government decision-making. This is different from the way the government conducted business in the days when this was pretty much an authoritarian place.

Taiwan is the Republic of China, the Republic of China is Taiwan.

People feel anxious, especially when we have to wonder whether the president, Taiwan's democratically elected president, will be addressed as president. If he cannot even defend his own title, what can he defend for us?

We have always had diverse channels of communication across the strait. These include not just official communications but also people-to-people contacts... There are differences between the positions of the two sides of the strait. In Taiwan, we have done our best to minimize that gap. I believe that the Chinese realize the goodwill we have put forth at the inauguration.

Different generations and people of different ethnic origins have different views on China. But they all agree on one thing. That is democracy.

China is still our largest trading partner; however, complementarity between our economies is decreasing. We had the ability to organize a manufacturing process, and then we moved our manufacturing capability to China to make use of their labor pool.