Any advice on Taiwan? Compared to China?

[jm21-2]

Wondering if anyone who has traveled to mainland China and Taiwan can comment on some of the differences.

Also, it seems like flights to Taiwan are way more expensive than to China...or is it just my poor searching skills?

I ask primarily because there is a Taiwanese girl I chatted with a lot while I was in law school and recently got back in touch with. We can still easily talk for 6 hours straight without getting bored. She's offered to show me around and help me with expenses, and the weather in Taiwan is looking awfully good compared to the PNW right now....

EDIT:
I certainly stand the chance of getting my ass kicked when both she and the Chinese girl I've been talking with want to meet around the Chinese New Year.

[Jeff S]

Taiwan is a great place to visit - well worth it. It's been a lot of years since I was there, and I've only been going to mainland China for the past few, so can't offer any apples and apples comparisons, but culturally it's very similar - a good percentage of the Taiwanese are Cantonese who ended up there when Mao ran Chang Kai Shek out in 1947.

[jm21-2]

Taiwan is a great place to visit - well worth it. It's been a lot of years since I was there, and I've only been going to mainland China for the past few, so can't offer any apples and apples comparisons, but culturally it's very similar - a good percentage of the Taiwanese are Cantonese who ended up there when Mao ran Chang Kai Shek out in 1947.

Yeah, that's why I thought there might be a lot of cultural similarities between Taiwan and Mainland China. I mean Taiwan is the Republic of China after all...obviously two very different countries politically and economically, but thought culturally there still might be a lot of similarities.

[Dave H]

I have not been there yet, but modern predominant Taiwanese culture  must be quite "Chinese" now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_aborigines#People.27s_Republic_of_China.27s_view_of_Taiwanese_Aborigines

"In 1949, on losing the Chinese Civil War to the Communist Party of China, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek led the Kuomintang in a retreat from Mainland China, withdrawing its government and 1.3 million refugees to Taiwan. The KMT installed an authoritarian form of government, and shortly thereafter inaugurated a number of political socialization programs aimed at nationalizing Taiwanese people as citizens of a Chinese nation and eradicating Japanese influence (Wilson 1970). The KMT pursued highly centralized political and cultural policies rooted in the party’s decades-long history of fighting warlordism in China and opposing competing concepts of a loose federation following the demise of the imperial Qing (Duara 1995). The project was designed to create a strong national Chinese cultural identity (as defined by the state) at the expense of local cultures (Phillips 2003:47-48;140–141)."

Prior to that:
"The Ami and other Taiwanese tribes were headhunters even as recently as the 1930’s. During the Japanese occupation, they were a perennial headache to the occupiers.

They had a tendency to behead the local Hokko Chinese (the mainland Chinese who came to Taiwan starting in the 1600’s)."

I personally would like to visit Taiwanese Ami aboriginal area, since Filipinos are are descended from Taiwanese aborigines (Ami):
"Taiwan, such that one can easily posit a Filipino-Ami subgroup. The most parsimonious conclusion is that most Filipinos today are derived from a large group of Ami who traveled via boat from Taiwan to the Philippines from 700-2,300 years." (http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/the-peopling-of-the-philippines/)

Dave