Like many US baseball fans who are also friends of Taiwan, I was disappointed to learn that Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball (MLB) in the US, has required the Taiwanese team competing in the upcoming World Baseball Classic to use the moniker "Chinese Taipei" during the games.
What has happened to the US, home of the brave and land of the free? Why is it caving in to communist China's bullying tactics? I was also saddened to learn that Taiwan is the only participant in the games whose flag has not been posted on the World Baseball Classic Web site. Instead, Taiwan is represented on the Web site by its Olympic Committee banner.
For more than 20 years, because of propaganda from communist China, athletes from Taiwan have been forced to compete under the Alice-in-Wonderland name of "Chinese Taipei" in the Olympic Games, even though Taiwan is in no way subject to the control of the unelected dictatorship in China. In addition, the playing of Taiwan's national anthem and the display of its national flag when Taiwan's hardworking athletes win Olympic medals is also not permitted. This will also be the case during the 2008 Summer Olympics set to be held in Beijing. How sad that the international community allows this bullying to continue.
Major League Baseball and the World Baseball Classic, however, should not follow the example of the International Olympic Committee by acting as an accomplice in China's obsessive bullying efforts to restrict the freedom and insult the dignity of the Taiwanese people. It is unfair and inappropriate for the US to treat Taiwan's citizens in this way, and it is an indignity to Taiwanese athletes who work just as hard as Cuban athletes, for example -- athletes whose full participation the MLB commissioner has worked quite diligently to ensure.
Rather than succumb to China's bullying efforts, Selig should promote fair play -- which, in the end, is what the US' national pastime is all about.
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