Nearly 1,000 supporters braved rain storms to welcome Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian (
The supporters, some from as far as Hawaii, waved green and white flags and pictures of the president as he arrived late Monday at a Manhattan hotel.
To thousands of Chinese immigrants here, Chen's trip has fueled a prickly debate between Taiwanese and Chinese immigrants who live and work in relative peace with one another, largely in Chinatown and Flushing, Queens.
But these days, the two groups have been at odds, arguing inside restaurant kitchens and on buses and subways, or trading political barbs across the pages of the city's Chinese-language newspapers.
"It's not easy to be the president in my country because everybody's against him, especially China," said Kathy Honz, a Taiwanese restaurant owner who drove from Boston for the rally.
Wendy Chen, a pharmaceutical scientist from Pennsylvania, said Chen's visit was the only opportunity to see the president because of his restricted travel in the US.
"He's the president of a nation. He should be able to enter this country and be treated as the head of a nation," said Chen, who was born and raised in Taiwan. "But I guess the United States was yielding to the pressure from China."
"I am calm," said William Wu, a chef who came to Flushing from Taiwan 13 years ago and works with waiters from Beijing at a restaurant in Hicksville, on Long Island. "But the people from mainland China, it's very hard for them to be calm."
Calm was not the prevailing sentiment Monday night when Chen arrived at about 6:30pm and was greeted by about 1,000 supporters. They waved green and white flags representing Taiwan and shouted "Long live Taiwan!"
On another corner stood the pro-China demonstrators, numbering about 500 but making more noise than their opponents, shouting "Defeat Taiwan!" and waving the PRC flag.
George Hua, an organizer of the pro-China rally, who immigrated from China in 1968, was running around with a megaphone, urging the protesters to chant louder.
"We Chinese have our political wisdom," Hua said during a break. "We don't need anyone interfering."
The police estimated that 1,500 people attended both rallies, most of them immigrants who had come to midtown Manhattan from across the region. The rain made them a soggy throng of white, red and green cloth and umbrellas.
In Monday's World Journal, the largest Chinese-language daily newspaper in the city, two advertisements appeared, each staking a position on Chen's visit and the Taiwan question.
A full-page advertisement, on page 7 welcomed him, and a half-page advertisement on page 9 denounced the visit and accused the Taiwanese leadership of using the New York stopover as a backhanded way of achieving a closer relationship with Washington.
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