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Letters: Taiwan's UN bid

Your report that? "US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said that the bid to enter the world body under the name `Taiwan' would be a move to change the `status quo'" ("Referendum a mistake, US official says", Aug. 29, page 1] sent me to the CIA World Factbook Web site (www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/), which closely reflects the political nuances of US international nomenclature. There I found Taiwan, out of the alphabetical order of countries, second from the bottom of the list.

Here is a relevant extract:

Country name:

conventional long form: none

conventional short form: Taiwan

In other words, the US does not even list?"Republic of China" (which suggests Chineseness)? as a possible name for your country (though we do list "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" for North Korea, which we do not recognize diplomatically). Instead, for decades we have insisted on "Taiwan" exclusively, which indicates to me that use of that name has long been integral to the "status quo."

Given this fact, I would like to respectfully ask the US deputy secretary of state to suggest the appropriate name to be used in your UN application. Or perhaps the problem is not the name, but rather the possibility that your 23 million people might be represented there?

Arthur Waldron

Lauder Professor of

International Relations

University of Pennsylvania

Negroponte seems to be offering US support for democracy, prosperity and fraternity in return for Taiwan giving up its demand for freedom and independence.

If the US State Department is so beholden to China that it continues to back Taiwan into that dismal corner and continues to assist China in suppressing Taiwan in everything from healthcare to wildlife, the Taiwanese will surely be driven to give the same answer as Patrick Henry in 1775: "Give me liberty or give me death."

As US President George W. Bush frequently reminds us, freedom and democracy are indivisible and universal values that cannot be parsed, sequenced, prioritized or put on hold. Is the US State Department so busy cutting deals around the world that it has forgotten its own mission? Or is its "intelligence" on cross-strait relations on a par with its intelligence on Iraq?

John Pickles

Taipei

The referendum to join the UN as "Taiwan" set off another firestorm in Taiwan-US relations with Negroponte accusing Taiwan of seeking to alter the "status quo." The fact that he said this in an interview broadcast on Chinese media is even more unnerving.

We all know that the "status quo" favors China and threatens Taiwan, yet US officials continue to drive this point in an era when China is expanding and modernizing its military, openly conducting cyber warfare and selling weapons to rogue states.

Taiwanese have lived under the shadow of those infamous two words for too long and have started to realize that perhaps the "status quo" does need to be redefined; not by politicians in Washington, not by the communists in Beijing, but by the good people of Taiwan.

If countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria and Cuba are allowed to become UN members, what reasonable argument is there to deny the Taiwanese, who enjoy a vibrant economy and democracy, the right to join the organization?

Perhaps the "status quo" between Taiwan and the US needs to be re-evaluated as well.

Eugene Liu

Atlanta, Georgia

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