TAIPEI, Taiwan -- People used to take notice of Hans Chien after he opened Caveman Restaurant in Beijing last year; doing business in China was all the rage, and the restaurant was a great topic of conversation when he returned home to Taiwan on vacation.
Now, however, many of his friends think he's nuts for wanting to live "over there." Not that business in Beijing is bad -- it's booming -- but Taiwanese have started to look at mainland China a bit differently.
"All my friends have changed their opinion over the past year," the 33-year-old entrepreneur said. "Mainland China used to be in; now people are skeptical and even hostile towards it."
Indeed, Taiwanese are undergoing a huge shift in how they view their colossal cousin across the Taiwan Straits.
For decades, the two sides were frozen in a virtual state of war. China's Communists won the civil war in 1949 and drove the Nationalist government to this island province, where it still officially claims to represent the rest of China.
Then there was the thaw, from Cold War hostility to a recent euphoria, in which the two sides started doing business. But now, again, many people here are feeling increasingly nervous about China's intentions toward what it still refers to as a renegade province.
These feelings stem from many sources. This month, for example, China blasted a visit to Taiwan by a Clinton administration Cabinet official, reinforcing many people's feeling that China will never allow Taiwan to escape its status as a international pariah.
Earlier this year, many Taiwanese were shocked when 24 Taiwanese tourists were killed in a pirate attack on Qiandao Lake in Southern China, an incident China tried unsuccessfully to cover up as an accident. Added to that have been the failure of recent cross-straits talks to produce any agreements and recent Chinese insistence that it reserves the right to retake Taiwan by force.
A sign of the times is the popularity of a book by journalist Cheng Lang-ping, which predicts that China will invade Taiwan next August. The book has become a runaway best seller, having touched a nerve in Taiwan among people worried about China's intentions.
One bellwether of Taiwan's present view of Communist China is the number of people traveling to the mainland. Ever since Taiwan started allowing tourists and business people unrestricted travel to China in 1988, the numbers have risen steadily, from 430,766 in 1988 to 1.54 million last year.
But this year the numbers are down sharply, with visits unlikely to total much more than 1 million.
"Relations have not been very good, particularly beginning with the Qiandao Lake incident. This was a real turning point. You could feel this change of mood. It really soured relations," said Su Chi, vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, the Taiwanese body that sets policy with mainland China.
Last year, Taiwan and mainland China had agreed to hold regular talks and to work toward more normal relations.
The two sides initialed an agreement this summer to deal with hijackings and fishing disputes, but last month they couldn't settle on appropriate diplomatic language and ended talks without an agreement.
Each side has blamed the other for the failure, but beyond the diplomatic sparring is a more fundamental difference in how the two sides view each other.
The people running Taiwan -- broadly speaking, people like Mr. Su -- have little recollection of the civil war that drove the Nationalist government here. They are most interested in protecting Taiwan's successful export economy and in giving the island a political voice in international organizations.
Mainland China, by contrast, is still being run by an older generation born of the struggle against the Nationalists.
"People of my generation don't care about the civil war. I was 6 years old in 1949. . . . We aren't anyone's province. We want to protect our interests," Mr. Su said.
Taiwan's ultimate goal, United Nations membership, is unlikely as long as China holds a U.N. veto. Other organizations also elude Taiwan: for example, the island nation had no say in the recently promulgated Law of the Sea. Recently, a tough new international wildlife law targeting countries like Taiwan that import rare animals was drawn up without Taiwan's participation.
In addition, many Taiwanese feel that when they travel abroad they are the victims of slights and humiliations because few countries have diplomatic relations with them -- China forces countries to choose between it and Taiwan.
Taiwanese feel they are singled out for this sort of treatment because their country is essentially an international outcast.
Despite this isolation imposed by Beijing, Taiwan has been somewhat successful in cultivating friends in Washington. The recent midterm elections in the United States, for example, put many sympathetic Republicans in control of key Congressional committees.
On top of that is the Clinton administration's new policy of allowing higher-level contacts between Washington and Taipei, which had been banned after Washington's recognition of Beijing in 1978 as the legitimate representative of China.
On Dec. 5, Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena became the highest-ranking Cabinet official to visit Taiwan since Vice President Nelson Rockefeller attended dictator Chiang Kai-shek's funeral in 1975. Mr. Pena was in Taiwan to participate in a conference on transportation, but the visit was widely viewed in Taiwan as a sign that Washington is not ignoring Taipei anymore.
Even this modest visit, however, aroused Beijing to lash out at what it said was an attempt by Washington to "conduct official exchanges" in violation of U.S.-China accords.
In this uncertain atmosphere, it's little wonder that more people are leaving Taiwan. Last year some 20,000 people emigrated, 15 percent more than the year before, many citing Taiwan's unstable future as a reason for leaving, according to government statistics.