My wife and I just finished watching a rebroadcast of Lien Chan's "historic" speech at Beida and came to the conclusion that one of his main points ran along the lines of "what a great man I am to have come to the mainland and to Beida". His speech was full of quotes from the leaders of different countries (Churchill, for instance, and Reagan's [ugh] "If not us, then who? If not now, then when?") that would make you think, if you didn't know better, that Lien was a national leader himself. (The Reagan quote came near the end of the speech, and Lien connected it to his reasons for being in China.)
He also got some shots in on the DPP and TSU, criticizing their ideas as still being in the 20th century. (Which is kind of ironic--I thought half the 20th century in Taiwan was dominated by a political party that spent a lot of its time thinking about how it would retake the mainland...) Altogether it looked like it was lapped up by the Beida audience (even though Lien did imply at one point that a lot of the intellectual giants of Beida, like Hu Shih and Fu Ssu-nien, escaped to Taiwan after 1949... ahem...).
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