The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been at the center of attention and criticism for the creation of 20,000 stickers with the slogan: “I am Taiwanese. I am from Taiwan” in Vietnamese and English, which it sent to Vietnam, hoping it would help anti-China protesters distinguish Taiwanese from Chinese.
The property of hundreds of Taiwanese businesses and the lives of thousands of Taiwanese were at risk after the protests broke out in southern Vietnam last week which later devolved into riots against foreign companies and factories, in particular those from Taiwan because, according to the ministry, Vietnamese had trouble differentiating Taiwanese from Chinese.
Deputy Foreign Minister Vanessa Shih (史亞平) was seen posing with the stickers and smiling.
While analysts said the emergency measure was “simply stupid” and came too late, it would be hard to fault the slogan itself.
However, it showed that the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has repeatedly exploited the name of Taiwan when it is convenient without considering the implication of the name of Taiwan.
The slogan made one wonder why it was not “I am not Chinese,” but only “I am from Taiwan,” since the protest was targeted at the Chinese.
A message circulating on social media suggested it must have been difficult and confusing for the Vietnamese to tell Taiwanese from Chinese because the flights sending the businesspeople back to Taiwan belonged to “China Airlines” and the destination was “Chinese Taipei.”
The Vietnam incident was not the first case of Ma exploiting the name of Taiwan for his own reasons.
During the presidential campaign in 2008, Ma famously told supporters on the eve of election day that he would be Taiwanese until the day he dies. Only months after his inauguration in May 2008, Ma said he was not only Taiwanese, but also Chinese.
In June 2008, the Ma administration demanded all government agencies stop referring to China as China or the People’s Republic of China (PRC), saying the official name of China on any government document should be the “Mainland” or “Mainland China” and that all foreign delegation visits would be referred as “Fan Hua (訪華)” — meaning visiting Zhonghua Minguo (中華民國) — rather than “Fan Tai (訪台),” which means visiting Taiwan.
On June 1, 2009, Ma briefly met with then-US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton at a banquet hosted by former Salvadoran president Elias Antonio Saca in the Central American country and introduced himself as “the President of Taiwan.”
Ma then took time to explain his conversation with Clinton to Taiwanese reporters the next day, saying that Taiwan was a “common term to refer to ourselves” and that by using “Taiwan,” he was referring to the Republic of China (ROC), not the Republic of Taiwan.
During Ma’s re-election campaign in 2011, his office created a slogan, which read: “I’m a Taiwanese and also a ROCer,” referring to a ROC national.
In the past year, Taiwan has been embroiled in a controversy surrounding the Ma administration’s effort to “de-Taiwanize” high-school history textbooks with curriculum guidelines spearheaded by pro-unification politicians and academics. The revised guidelines also tried to highlight that Taiwan and China both share the same Zhonghua culture (中華文化).
Ma may have good reason for using the name of Taiwan, because the Constitution, as crazy as it is, still lists China and Mongolia as the territory of the ROC.
However, it will be difficult for him to evade public scrutiny on his opportunistic, flip-flopping position on the name of this nation and his exploitation of it to advance his own agenda.
For Taiwanese, who maybe for the first time faced losing their lives when they called themselves — or were mistaken as — Chinese in the Vietnam incident, it is time to develop a practical and comprehensive idea of the difference between Taiwan and China.
In the US’ National Security Strategy (NSS) report released last month, US President Donald Trump offered his interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine. The “Trump Corollary,” presented on page 15, is a distinctly aggressive rebranding of the more than 200-year-old foreign policy position. Beyond reasserting the sovereignty of the western hemisphere against foreign intervention, the document centers on energy and strategic assets, and attempts to redraw the map of the geopolitical landscape more broadly. It is clear that Trump no longer sees the western hemisphere as a peaceful backyard, but rather as the frontier of a new Cold War. In particular,
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
When it became clear that the world was entering a new era with a radical change in the US’ global stance in US President Donald Trump’s second term, many in Taiwan were concerned about what this meant for the nation’s defense against China. Instability and disruption are dangerous. Chaos introduces unknowns. There was a sense that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might have a point with its tendency not to trust the US. The world order is certainly changing, but concerns about the implications for Taiwan of this disruption left many blind to how the same forces might also weaken
RSS