The diplomatic truce with China that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his government adhere to has been so successful that they have to use stickers to save Taiwanese businesspeople from further attacks after the recent anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam. The government also has to go all the way to ask the American Institute in Taiwan to issue a letter to prove that Ma is no longer a US resident to help the president solve a personal political problem.
Meanwhile, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who took such a high-profile approach in suppressing the student-led protests, will have to maintain a low profile when he transits through Los Angeles to attend the inauguration of Salvadorean president-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren on Sunday.
As for the nation’s representative office in the US, it seems to have nothing better to do to than to bring out relics from the Qing Dynasty — in this case a contract between the Qing and the US dealing with the export of Chinese workers to the US to work on railroad construction — to highlight the long history of Sino-US relations.
Taiwan’s domestic identity crisis is slowly disappearing, but the Ma government’s diplomatic truce with China is intensifying the crisis over the nation’s international status. The differentiation between the status of Taiwan and China is becoming increasingly blurred, and Ma’s policies have only strengthened China’s annexation policy, which is aimed at undermining Taiwan’s international status.
Taiwanese businesspeople in Vietnam have criticized the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saying it does not understand the situation in Vietnam, and that the stickers with the text: “I am Taiwanese, I come from Taiwan,” are useless.
Still, the fact that the Ma administration has been forced to use stickers in Vietnamese that tells the outside world: “I am Taiwanese” is a progress of sorts.
If the ministry could just enlarge the small English text: “I come from Taiwan” on the stickers and then distribute or display them at Taiwan’s representative offices around the world, that would be helpful to resolving the crisis surrounding the nation’s status. The problem is that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime has never been able to cast off its outdated and confusing China identity.
If the government really wanted to build an unambiguous, independent and autonomous status for Taiwan, representative offices abroad — especially those in the US and Japan — should display the stickers used in Vietnam together with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Treaty of Peace with Japan signed in San Francisco and the Taiwan Relations Act, instead of telling stories about the Burlingame Treaty signed by the US and Anson Burlingame, who at the time was heading a Chinese diplomatic mission to the US and the principal European nations.
The Qing emperor signed the Burlingame Treaty, which was an amendment to the Treaty of Tianjin, in 1858, but the Qing Dynasty does not exist anymore, nor does the republic that replaced it. Today, this document, which was brought to Taiwan by late dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), is what Taiwan brings up.
Qing Dynasty Chinese workers and students benefited from the treaty. Overseas Taiwanese in the US today benefit from the Taiwan Relations Act and its separation of the Taiwanese immigration quota from the Chinese. Taiwanese businesspeople in Vietnam were attacked because their status is unclear.
Overseas Taiwanese are eager to display the fact that they are Taiwanese. Instead, Taiwan’s representative office in the US brings out an antiquated Qing Dynasty document talking about Chinese workers. What are these times we are living in?
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
Before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can blockade, invade, and destroy the democracy on Taiwan, the CCP seeks to make the world an accomplice to Taiwan’s subjugation by harassing any government that confers any degree of marginal recognition, or defies the CCP’s “One China Principle” diktat that there is no free nation of Taiwan. For United States President Donald Trump’s upcoming May 14, 2026 visit to China, the CCP’s top wish has nothing to do with Trump’s ongoing dismantling of the CCP’s Axis of Evil. The CCP’s first demand is for Trump to cease US
RSS