TAIPEI -- After you beat 'em, join 'em?

That's what Lung Ying-tai did. Sixteen years ago Ms. Lung, then an academic, stirred the pot with her harsh political critiques of the government at a time when the island was under martial rule and few dared challenge the authorities. Death threats ensued. But Ms. Lung's book, "Wild Fire," became one of the most popular and influential books of the '80s. In her own small way, she helped bring about the end of 38 years of martial law in 1987.

Now the former rebel is taking on an even more daunting task: Exchanging her fiery pen for a local bureaucrat's chop. Ms. Lung is trying to carve out a vibrant urban culture in a Taipei better known for its pollution than its pop art. Appointed in 1999 to head the city's first-ever Cultural Affairs Bureau, the soft-spoken 50-year-old is finding that it's easier to poke holes in policies than to craft them. The government inefficiency and corruption that she fought against as a writer is shackling her as a bureaucrat. And the political freedom she pushed as an agitator has engendered a cacophony of divergent public voices that often makes it hard to get things done.

Her struggle, in many ways, captures the cultural dilemma in much of Asia. The pursuit of economic modernization in many Asian countries left art and cultural issues on the backburner. Now, with the new political and economic freedoms that Asia's prosperity has brought, culture is back in demand. The problem is nobody can agree on what culture is and how to save it.

Case in point: Whether to preserve or tear down an abandoned military village in downtown Taipei. On a recent visit Ms. Lung was confronted by former residents and activists who want the government to save the community, which was built more than 40 years ago to house families of Chinese soldiers who fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek. The village, these activists argue, should be kept in its entirety as a showcase of Taiwan's history. Several government departments, property developers and residents nearby disagree. They contend a museum, park or school would be a better use of the precious downtown space. Some just want the site bulldozed. The dispute remains unresolved -- the village's fate rests with a city government committee.

LUNG YING-TAI

Writer turned bureaucrat

Age: 50 Birthplace: Kaohsiung, Taiwan Education: Kansas State University, Ph.D. in American and English Literature, 1982; Bowling Green State University, Ohio, M.A. in American Studies, 1977; National Cheng-kung University, Taiwan, B.A. in Foreign Languages and Literature, 1974. Family: Husband and two sons in Germany Residence: Taipei What are the main challenges facing Taiwan's culture today? The biggest one is how to cope with modernization. How does one take a fresh look at one's tradition? How does one find new value in one's tradition? That's the biggest challenge. Another aspect of this is democracy. The biggest challenge is how you cope with the responsibilities of having freedom. What about challenges facing Asian cultures as a whole? All these cultures are trying to bridge tradition and modernization. Asians have to come out of the shadow of a long century of colonization. They have to find new values in their own cultures. It's a kind of Asian awareness -- knowing who we are and where we are heading. The world has been dominated by Western civilization for so long. It's not good for diversity. What can be done to preserve the culture without hampering economic growth? I don't see the two as two opposing forces. In European cities, there are a lot of examples. One has to find a clever way for the transformation. We're just starting out in Taipei. How much government involvement should there be when it comes to preserving culture? Is it essential? It really depends on the stage of development. At this stage in Taipei, the government has to play a leading role in making cultural policies because all the existing laws were drafted or conceived without any consideration for cultural development. A lot of infrastructure has to be laid down for a changing of the laws. At a later stage, the government's only responsibility will be to provide an environment good for cultural growth.

"All these debates are actually a process where city culture is being formed," Ms. Lung reasons. "Only through controversies does the society find a consensus." Though the flowering of democracy in Taiwan sometimes complicates Ms. Lung's efforts to get simple things done, like clearing a piece of land for development, she believes Taiwan's model is still better than what exists in many other parts of Asia.

"In Shanghai if you want to build a highway, you can overnight move thousands and thousands of residents away and have the highway built in a matter of months," she says. "But behind this efficiency there are many, many people sacrificed that you don't hear about. I don't want this. (Having different voices and opinions from the society) is a price democracy has to pay."

Ms. Lung finds the more tepid forms of public debate advocated by "Asian values" proponents, like Singapore Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew, unexciting. In 1994, she wrote an article entitled "Thank God I Am Not Singaporean," criticizing Mr. Lee's attempt to speak for all Asians and the Singapore government's tight control of civil freedoms in exchange for public order. The article sparked months of debates and opposition in Singapore.

Now, it's Ms. Lung's turn in the hot seat. Taipei's culture offerings are a mixed bag. Taipei hosts a lively pop-music scene, and is one of the world's biggest markets for Chinese-language publications: There are 6,000 to 7,000 new book titles published in Taiwan every year, while in China, which has 56 times more people than Taiwan, there are only about 9,000 new titles annually (that number includes calendars). Taipei also has the Palace Museum, which houses one of the world's largest collection of Chinese art.

But the city, for example, lacks a native art scene to speak of. Younger Taiwanese artists often have to struggle to find museums that will showcase their work. Promoting indigenous art is one of Ms. Lung's top priorities. Towards that end, she has enlisted the help of overseas artists as well as local ones. Each year, Taipei will sponsor 25 foreign artists, mainly from other parts of Asia, as artists-in-residence for two- to three-month stints. At the same time she's sending 20 Taipei-based artists abroad. In late March two Taipei visual artists will go to Jerusalem.

In keeping with her belief that culture often results from spirited debates among free-thinking citizens, Ms. Lung has organized public seminars to discuss Chinese classics for Taipei's many avid readers. But she says there's more to be done: She wants to see new public museums, galleries, artists' studios and literary haunts. In an effort to rope in Taiwan's big corporations, she is also lobbying for new laws to give corporations tax exemptions for donations to cultural or art organizations, as well as laws that put artists on a national pension plan.

If some of this sounds like a theory of culture flown in from the West, it should. Ms. Lung's cultural ideas have been shaped by her own international background. Born in Taiwan to immigrant parents from China's Hunan Province, she grew up in rural southern Taiwan and went to college there. But she studied for her master's and doctorate degrees in the U.S. and spent most of the past 20 years living there and in Europe. Her husband and two teen-age sons still live in Germany.

Upon returning to Taiwan in the late '80s from the U.S., she was irritated by the corruption, pollution and inefficiency. In a weekly newspaper column, she called for political reforms; a collection of those columns became "Wild Fire." She left Taiwan again a few years later to live in Europe and only returned in 1999 to take up her current post.

To her critics, Ms. Lung's long sojourn in the West has made her a cultural misfit in Taiwan. "She lived away from Taiwan for too long to know what real Taiwanese culture is," says Wang Hao, a Taipei city councilor. "There is a huge cultural gap between the Taiwan she knows and Taiwan today, which means she may not see things in the same light the locals do."

No doubt. Ms. Lung has occasionally called Taipei "ugly," offending some locals. Curtis Smith is one of them. "I think it's outrageous that a cultural-affairs director of the city would call the city ugly," says the Canadian cultural and environmental activist who has lived in Taipei for eight years. The problem with Ms. Lung, adds Mr. Curtis, is that "her heart is somewhere else, not in Taiwan."

In a concession to her detractors, Ms. Lung admits she isn't as familiar with Taipei as many locals. But she insists that her international experience brings the city a broader perspective. "Do we want somebody who knows every back alley of Taipei or do we want somebody who knows the world?" she asks. "Ideally you should have somebody who knows every back alley of Taipei and who also knows the world. But find me that person."

In the meantime, Ms. Lung appears to have found a strange form of beauty in a city she once deemed unlivable. She now peers beyond the illegally parked cars crammed into narrow alleys, and the hundreds of thousands of noisy scooters zigzagging through chaotic traffic. And she is no longer tripped up by the procession of gray concrete low-rises and apartment buildings adorned with odd colored tiles or gaudy designs.

"Underneath this ugliness, there's a very peculiar kind of charm to the city," Ms. Lung says. "Taipei is a painting in making. You still see fresh strokes. You still see empty spaces there. You see things happening. And that's the beauty of it."