The first of Taiwan's high-speed trains has arrived. With the media and VIPs, including Premier Yu Shyi-kun, in attendance, the two locomotives and 10 carriages were hoisted from the Poseidon Triumph, docked at Kaohsiung Harbour, and on to the back of trucks bound for the rail depot.

By September, the Japanese-built trains will be running on a test track between Tainan and Kaohsiung. If all goes to schedule, services on the 345km line will begin on October 31 next year. The 300km/h train will take just 90 minutes to do the journey from Taipei to Kaohsiung, stopping at Taichung. That is three times faster than the current train, and about the same as taking a plane, allowing for check-in and commuting.

It is hard not to be a little sceptical of the project, yet a certain amount of awe is unavoidable, too. For starters, it is the world's largest build-operate-transfer project, costing close to US$15 billion. The concept sees the contractor build the railway and then operate it for a fixed period, before handing it back to the government. The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation is hoping that its 35-year lease on the railway, plus a 50-year lease on adjoining development land, will bring enough revenue to recoup costs.

Investors and bankers, however, remain sceptical. In fact, the company has been having trouble completing the next round of funding. The plan is to raise another US$1.7 billion by the end of next year to see the project through to completion and to provide operating funds to get the wheels turning.

Company executives are certainly not showing any signs of concern. Chairwoman Nita Ing exuded a cool confidence on Tuesday, as the train arrived, when asked about the funding difficulties and an overrun of approximately 12 per cent in the construction budget.

As the project nears completion, she reasoned, anticipation will build and investors will realise what a good bet it is. The gamble rides on whether passengers think it is a good idea. To date, most travellers in a hurry go by air, using Taipei's Song Shan Airport and Kaohsiung Airport.

Personally, my mind was made up as I returned - by plane - from the unveiling ceremony in Kaohsiung. On our final approach into Taipei, the plane was less than 200 metres from the ground when the captain opened the throttle and we headed skyward again. A few minutes later he explained that a warning light had come on and he would investigate before landing. Memories of Taiwan's sketchy aviation safety record came flooding back. We did land safely, but the new high-speed rail scheme probably just found itself another 300 passengers.

Citizens in ultra-tidy Singapore can chew gum again - but only if they are registered users.

Gum dealers face jail if they break the rules, which were brought in after the city state lifted a 12-year ban on the sticky stuff.

Before Singaporeans think about unwrapping a pack of the Wrigley's Orbit gum that's just started selling - and only in pharmacies - they have to submit their names and ID card numbers.

If they don't, pharmacists who sell them gum could be jailed up to two years and fined S$5,000 (HK$22,700).

Singapore outlawed the manufacture, import and sale of chewing gum in 1992 after the country's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, complained that it was fouling streets, buildings, buses and subway trains.

Gum became a sticking point months ago in Singapore's free-trade talks with Washington, when Representative Philip Crane of the US state of Illinois - home of chewing-gum giant Wrigley - pressed the issue.

Singapore compromised, agreeing to allow only the sale of "therapeutic" gum in pharmacies. The free-trade pact took effect on January 1. The sale of 19 "medicinal" and "dental" gum products has been allowed.

But Singaporeans, many of whom have long derided the gum ban, seemed unimpressed.

"It's ridiculous that it's easier for 16-year-olds to visit prostitutes than it is to get chewing gum here," said 22-year-old college student Fayen Wong.

A little over a year ago, "hactivists" dedicated to ensuring the free flow of information on the internet were beginning to wonder if they weren't banging their heads against China's Great Firewall. The government had just made a leap forward in its ability to control the net, and some were even convinced that Beijing had already turned the technology to its own advantage as a tool of repression. But things change fast in cyberspace.

The hactivists kept pounding away at the wall and Chinese today have found holes to dart through. New software, such as Dynaweb's "Dongtai" and Ultrareach's "Roaming without Borders", can be easily downloaded in China, allowing users to surf freely. "Everyone is using it," says one writer, who believes Chinese are openly passing the programs around. "And the government can't trace the internet provider's address." She says the software is continuously getting better.

"I can get any information I want," says a grinning Ren Wanding, a well-known political dissident who also uses one of the programs. A few months earlier, he had to rely on foreign friends to give him news of what was going on in his own country.

But there is a bigger problem for the government than people freely roaming the internet. The internet is fast becoming the tail that is wagging the communist dragon.

An example is the scandal surrounding Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, which has rocked US authorities. Anthony Spires, a Yale University researcher, studied internet postings on the "Strengthening the Country Discussion Forum", which is operated by the People's Daily internet website. He says that while 45 per cent of those commenting expressed clearly anti-American sentiments, one-fourth of the postings praised the US media for exposing the prison abuse. There also was criticism of the Chinese media for not doing the same at home. More than a third of those posting messages on the site praised America's democratic system, with many saying they were impressed by the public apologies by the US president and secretary of state.

It may just be a coincidence, but on May 12, just days after the first official Chinese reports of the incident in Iraq, the mainland announced that it was going to investigate human rights infringements, including allegations of prison abuse.

Then there was the BMW affair, which fuelled anger over growing inequality between rich and poor. Su Xiuwen, allegedly the relative of an official, became enraged last October when a farm vehicle scratched the side mirror of her BMW. She slapped the farmer, jumped back into her car, and drove over a crowd of 13 farmers, killing the one who damaged her car. Su was handed a suspended sentence after paying compensation to the victims - reportedly due to political intervention.

After seeing the story on the website Sina.com, newspapers around the country ran with the news. Resulting chat room traffic and postings complaining about the light sentence and judicial corruption were soon exceeding 180,000 a day on some websites.

A national uproar forced the government to reopen the case. Although the hearing ended with the sentence being upheld and the government declared discussion of the court decision off-limits, a glance at popular chat rooms this month still finds angry diatribes about the case.

A Sina.com official confided to Bill Xia, the head of Dynaweb, that an article about the BMW case on the Sina. com website attracted one million viewers. "Now, that's the kind of influence we're looking at," says Mr Xia.

The story of Sun Zhigang had even more far-reaching implications. Sun, a graphic designer from Wuhan, was detained by Guangzhou police last spring for not carrying proper identification. After he was beaten to death by fellow prisoners in a detention centre, his death was reported by a local newspaper and then spread around the mainland via the internet.

The incident led to a public outcry, and shortly after authorities scrapped the hardline, two-decades-old laws on vagrancy. As a result, police can no longer arbitrarily detain vagrants and beggars, a move that Xinhua called "a pivotal reform of China's social welfare system".

The Sun Dawu case is another example of the power of web opinion. Sun, a popular entrepreneur dubbed China's Robin Hood, was arrested last year on what appeared to be politically motivated charges of running an illegal bank, and was sentenced to a long prison term. He was set free after just 158 days in prison, after his case was taken up by China's "netizens".

Likewise, in March, pressure from the internet likely played a role in the release of three mothers of victims of the 1989 Tiananmen incident - a story the traditional media avoided. When the Sars crisis erupted in China last year, millions of worried Chinese switched on their computers to read news that was being censored in the media. Internet traffic shot up 40 per cent.

While the government quickly threatened to punish Chinese who spread rumours about the epidemic, high-ranking officials reportedly confided to university students that they too relied on the internet for information about Sars.

Visits to the Dynaweb site, which offers an apparently foolproof proxy net for getting around the government firewall, shot up 50 per cent in a 24-hour period, and doubled again within one week. Mr Xia says his site is now seeing 100,000 visitors a day.

"Every big lie that gets exposed is a promotion for us," says Mr Xia. "As more and more information gets out, the credibility of the government will decline."

Dynaweb received another boost during the Taiwan presidential election in March, when state television dragged its feet in getting results out about the voting. The internet craze is also spilling over into the foreign relations arena, where China's leaders have frequently been slapped on the wrist for being "weak-kneed".

Experts say that growing anti-Japanese sentiment on a fiercely nationalist website led Beijing to take a tough stance on Japan's arrest of seven Chinese activists who illegally sailed to one of the contested Diaoyu Islands in March.

When the arrests were announced, the internet was flooded with angry postings calling for a hardline approach against "small Japan", a derogatory term used by some Chinese.

The government had hoped that the case would not upset bilateral relations, but it allowed protesters a rare opportunity to demonstrate in front of the Japanese consulate for several days. And when the central government censored US Vice-President Dick Cheney's speech in Shanghai in April, Chinese surfers were quick to post the uncut original version of the speech -which included comments on individual liberties and political freedoms - on various websites.

They even provided notes on how the official version deviated from the original. Censors may have been fooled by the fact that the Chinese characters for Mr Cheney's name were exchanged for characters with the same phonetic sound to put the monitors off the trail, a routine trick.

"Surveying Internet Usage and Impact in 12 Chinese Cities", a report produced by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences last October, seemingly contradicts the conventional wisdom that says the internet is having a limited impact in China. The study, funded by the Markle Foundation in the US, offers new information about the beliefs of China's online population.

Most important, according to the authors who are also prominent mainland scholars, there is a hope that "the new technology will fundamentally change the Chinese political system". The survey indicates that the majority of internet users are increasingly seeing the internet "as a force for positive change in the country".

The report said 71.8 per cent of internet users agreed that it provided more opportunities for citizens to express political views.

Another 60.8 per cent said that by using the internet, people had more opportunities to criticise government policies. And 72.3 per cent said that by using the internet, higher officials would have a better understanding of the views of common people. Only 12.9 per cent said political content should be controlled.

While the survey found that the majority of those surveyed had greater trust in the traditional media than in the internet or foreign media, the authors argue that the internet provides news that the state-controlled media can not. They say that the internet has become a medium for evaluating the failings of the traditional media.

Mr Xia says his software will reach critical mass by the end of the year, when half a million Chinese will be using his program.

"When the number of regular visitors reaches this number, pretty much any internet user who wants to access uncensored news will be able to find friends to show him how," he says. "When that critical mass is reached, the matrix will crash under another blatant lie like the Sars breakout."

Asked if the government can't simply outgun him, Mr Xia replies that he's "pretty optimistic about the technology part".

"Right now we are running a few steps ahead of them," he says. "The Chinese government has a lot of money, but it's inefficient.

"And with the internet, they are on the defensive. And that's a hard territory to defend."

As Taiwan prepares to inaugurate the second term of Chen Shui-bian as president, China is doing its usual sabre rattling and warning Taiwan to refrain from independence moves.

The article headlined "China warning to Taiwan unhelpful: US State Department" (scmp.com, May 18) said China also offered to reward the island with benefits such as direct trade, transport links and increased access to mainland markets if it toed the Beijing line. At the same time, Taiwan was again denied entry to the WHO.

If Premier Wen Jiabao travels the world saying how important the return of Taiwan is for China, one wonders why China has yet to take a single significant step that will reassure the Taiwanese people that this is not equal to war.

The truth is that China has nothing concrete to offer the people of Taiwan. Is it offering democracy, more and better employment opportunities, better standards of living, less corruption? For the Taiwanese, there is nothing attractive about living in a re-unified, totalitarian China that is becoming the bully of Asia.

HARRY CHEN, Mei Foo

Mark Chen Tan-sun The Sars virus, which ravaged the Asia-Pacific region last year, has re-emerged in China. This time, it originated from one of Beijing's leading laboratories, following the pattern of two isolated cases in Singapore and Taiwan last year. However, unlike those previous incidents, it has already spread outside the laboratory, necessitating the quarantine of hundreds of people and tragically causing at least one death.

It is disturbing to note that although this outbreak occurred just before the recent visit to Beijing of Lee Jong-wook, the director-general of the World Health Organisation, the world learned of it only after Dr Lee had left.

In response to the latest outbreak, Taiwan has already taken proactive measures. We have placed our public health authorities on the first stage of national alert, which includes screening all incoming passengers. We have also issued travel advisories for Beijing and Anhui province, and instituted special monitoring of visits to medical research laboratories worldwide by our researchers. Should any suspect cases be discovered, they will be immediately transferred to dedicated treatment facilities established last year, and quarantine and comprehensive prevention and monitoring will be carried out according to the regulations laid down by the special cabinet-level Sars taskforce.

These are some of the lessons that we learned the hard way from the experience last year, when Sars caused 73 deaths in Taiwan and major disruptions to our health and transport systems.

However, one other clear lesson is that Taiwan must be allowed to participate fully in the international monitoring and information networks led by the WHO. Unfortunately, this lesson remains unlearned.

At the time of the initial Sars outbreak, the WHO refused our requests for information, and our calls went unanswered in the crucial first few weeks, during which we had a window of opportunity to contain the outbreak. Only after our situation deteriorated dramatically in late April did the WHO send its first experts to Taiwan.

Since then, the situation has not really improved, despite the passage at last year's World Health Assembly of Resolution 56.29, which requires the WHO director-general "to respond appropriately to all requests for WHO support for surveillance, prevention and control of Sars". Although representatives from our Centre for Disease Control were allowed to attend one international Sars conference last June, the WHO subsequently refused or ignored repeated requests for participation in related events. These problems are in fact only symptomatic of the larger issue of Taiwan's participation in WHO information networks. Just in the past year, requests for information on the outbreak of bird flu in several countries in the region were similarly rebuffed.

Indeed, the WHO has begun to institutionalise this stance, with a directive that any contact by any of its staff with any Taiwanese experts or organisations requires prior consultation with the WHO legal counsel.

This constitutes a new form of "health apartheid", where Taiwan is given separate and unequal treatment. This is unfair to the 23 million people of Taiwan.

This week, for the eighth time, Taiwan was denied observer status in the World Health Assembly. This would have filled the gap in the international monitoring network, not only for Sars, but for all other future disease outbreaks in the Asia-Pacific region. It would have helped protect the health not only of our people, but of all peoples, not least the citizens of the People's Republic of China.

It is time for the international community to put an end to "health apartheid" and allow Taiwan an appropriate level of participation in the WHO.

Chen Tan-sun is foreign minister of Taiwan

Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian, who narrowly won a disputed election in March, has to be the Bush administration's least favourite democratically elected leader. After my week in Washington talking to officials, the impression is unmistakable that Mr Chen, due to be inaugurated for a second term next week, is neither trusted nor liked by most American officials. In fact, if Mr Chen, who was given a warm welcome in New York last October, were to ask for another transit visa now, he would be turned down.

During the election campaign, Mr Chen repeatedly ignored President George W. Bush's warnings not to provoke Beijing by harping on sensitive political issues, such as the holding of a referendum and the drafting of a new constitution. In December, Mr Bush took the unprecedented step of rebuking him in public. With Premier Wen Jiabao at his side, he branded Mr Chen someone who "may be willing to make decisions unilaterally to change the status quo, which we oppose".

It was a major blow for Mr Chen, and he may well have lost the election were it not for the botched assassination attempt the day before the poll, which won him sympathy votes. Despite the rebuke, Mr Chen held a referendum on March 20, the same day as the presidential election, although he did tone down the proposed topic. Instead of calling on Beijing to withdraw missiles aimed at Taiwan, it proposed that the island strengthen its anti-missile defences. The referendum was defeated.

Since his narrow electoral victory, Mr Chen has talked about drafting a new constitution, to be voted on in 2006 and to come into effect in 2008. Beijing has called this a timetable for Taiwan independence.

Washington is now trying to make sure that Mr Chen does not say anything provocative in his inaugural speech next Thursday. It also wants to ensure that any constitutional revision will not touch on sensitive sovereignty issues. In fact, it has told the Taiwan leader that if he does not behave himself, Mr Bush is prepared to deliver a second public rebuke.

Since the US is the guarantor of Taiwan's security, any deterioration in relations will be taken seriously. Mr Chen has now achieved the dubious distinction of antagonising both the mainland and the United States. Has he learned his lesson? Chen Chien-jen, head of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, thinks so. "I believe our president and government have learned what we should do and what we should avoid," he said. Washington's antipathy is directed at Mr Chen, not Taiwan. There is considerable support for Taiwan's democracy, but little interest in helping Mr Chen with his pro-independence agenda.

There is also a widespread feeling in Washington that the mainland military threat is underestimated. The Chen administration has dismissed the mainland as little more than a paper tiger, in part because of its conviction that the US would come to Taiwan's aid if the worst came to the worst. "It's a big, big mistake [for Taiwan to consider Beijing a paper tiger and to lower its defence budget]," one US official said. "We don't want them to buy weapons to please us, but because there is a real threat."

However, Lin Wen-chang, a senior adviser to Taiwan's National Security Council, disagrees. "China is not strong enough to take over Taiwan," he said at a conference in Washington on Thursday. "We have no intention to cross China's red lines, [but at the same time] we shouldn't allow China to define the red lines."

In the view of the US, the greatest danger is a miscalculation on the part of either Taipei or Beijing. That is why Washington keeps urging the two sides to resume their dialogue, broken off five years ago. But Beijing insists that talks can only take place if Taiwan accepts the "one China" principle - which Mr Chen rejects.

Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based journalist and commentator.

frankching1@aol.com