TAIWAN: To anyone visiting Taiwan who knows only the People's Republic of China (PRC) across the strait, the island feels like science fiction.
Taiwan is recognisably China but it's a version of China that seems to exist in a parallel universe.
In Taiwan you experience a China where order reigns, in stark contrast to chaotic mainland China.
In the hyper-modern capital Taipei, gleaming scooters are the main form of two-wheeled transport, whereas the bicycle still rules the roost on the mainland.
The island became known as Formosa from the Portuguese word for beautiful, the word 16th century Portuguese sailors en route to Japan used to describe the island.
Taipei itself is not an especially beautiful city, but it's certainly an orderly and well-functioning one. Everything is clean and polished from the street level up.
Taiwan is not Chinese in the way Hong Kong is as at it doesn't have the British colonial overlay. If anything, the Japanese have made more of an impression - they ruled Taiwan for half a century in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In many ways the development of Taiwan mirrors that of China.
Taiwan as it is today is the creation of the Chinese nationalists, the Kuomintang (KMT), and their generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek. The KMT fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing the civil war to Mao Zedong's communists.
Walking through Taipei it's hard not to keep asking yourself the question: What if...? What if the Nationalists hadn't lost? Fans of Taiwan like to say it is an example of what China could have been like if the Nationalists had prevailed.
Critics of this view counter with the argument that running an island of 23 million people is much easier than governing 1.3 billion people.
Taipei and Beijing have no official relations. China insists that Taiwan is part of its territory, and regularly insists that the two should be unified.
The Taiwanese people are a mix of indigenous Taiwanese, Chinese and Japanese. Most are ethnically Han Chinese, like the majority of mainlanders, and most people speak the mandarin Chinese familiar from the PRC.
While China's economy is growing strongly and massive advances are obvious in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, Taiwan has the kind of sophistication that only decades of economic strength can bring. During the 1990s the economy grew by around 6 per cent every year.
Taiwanese people pride themselves on their openness and friendliness, traits rarer on the mainland.
There are, of course, slight differences in this parallel universe. Taiwan has it's own way of transliteration, or spelling out Chinese words in roman script, and it uses more complicated Chinese characters.
And, perhaps most significantly, Taiwan is one of Asia's few effective democracies - President Chen Shui-bian's victory in elections in 2000 was the first democratic change of power in 3,400 years of recorded Chinese history.
That said, Taiwan's democracy is a very idiosyncratic one.The democracy is so lively that politicians throw their lunch boxes at each other in parliament to nail home their point, in a manner familiar to some English Premiership managers.
President Chen and his vice-president, Annette Lu, were mysteriously shot less than 24 hours before this year's election, a key poll where voters were asked to decide whether the island should boost its defences against hundreds of Chinese missiles pointed at it from across the strait.
Then there is the biggest "what if" of them all - what if China decides to invade? There is nothing fictional about the fear that China might invade the island to force unification, an anxiety that hangs over everything. Everyone's eyes are constantly on the missiles across the strait.
There are 300,000 full-time soldiers and conscription is mandatory, while the air force is one of the best equipped in the world.
People keep their money in as liquid a form as possible just in case, and have the same kind of black humour familiar to anyone who visited Hong Kong in the late 1980s during the period of uncertainty there.
Taipei 101, a 508-metre skyscraper that is the tallest building in the world, is selling office space only slowly because people reckon it's too good a target for mainland rockets. Some people say the higher up you go in the skyscraper, the cheaper the rent.
People are openly divided on how to deal with China. As leader of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Mr Chen's main political aim is for Taiwan to lose its status as an estranged part of China and become an independent sovereign state.
Mr Chen won the election by just 30,000 votes and the losers cried foul. Many say Mr Chen is putting the security of the island in jeopardy by flirting with independence. A flirtation that could push Beijing over the edge.
One which would mean a hasty end to this particular version of China.
