At a Madonna concert in Taipei last year, the warm-up DJ shouted “I love Taiwan.”
The audience went wild, but the DJ followed this with “I love China” — which was met with stony silence from the crowd and put the workers at the concert venue on edge.
The DJ later apologized on Facebook, writing that he had allowed himself to get carried away in the moment and had accidentally humiliated the audience.
Humiliated is precisely how Taiwanese feel, because if they did not protest and fight, no one would know that people who are born and die Taiwanese cannot decide the name of their own nation. This is the abominable position China has put them in.
At the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, will Taiwanese still have to endure the name “Chinese Taipei?”
For Taiwanese, each successive change to the official name of the nation’s athletic teams has been a slap in the face.
The Olympic Charter states that “the practice of sport is a human right” and adds that the enjoyment of this right should be “without discrimination of any kind.”
From the perspective of Taiwanese, at least the International Olympic Committee talks about “human rights” and the absence of “discrimination,” so there is still some hope that it is worth continuing the fight.
In addition, the friendly relationship between Taiwan and Japan is strong and deep-rooted.
Following the earthquake and tsunami that devastated northeastern Japan on March 11, 2011, Taiwan donated ¥20 billion (US$175.3 million at the current exchange rate) of financial aid — more than any other nation — while Taiwanese rescue teams and relief supplies were second in number only to the US.
By contrast, during a soccer game, South Korean supporters wrote “celebrate the big earthquake in Japan” on a banner in Japanese
The stark contrast between Taiwanese and South Korean responses will forever be engraved on the hearts of Japanese. The warmth that Taiwan showed Japan during its time of need has motivated some Japanese to appeal for Taiwanese athletes to be allowed to compete under the name “Team Taiwan” at the Tokyo Olympics.
Hideki Nagayama obtained approval from the Japanese Ministry of Justice to remove “China” from foreigner registration cards for Taiwanese visiting Japan and replace it with “Taiwan.”
Nagayama also launched a campaign to change the name of the Taiwanese team at the Tokyo Olympics. This has included arranging for former minister of national defense and Taiwan UN Alliance director Michael Tsai (蔡明憲) to appear on Japanese TV and taking to the streets of Tokyo to drum up support from Japanese.
With Japanese supporting the name change movement, how can Premier William Lai (賴清德) not represent the will of Taiwanese and declare that the nation’s name is important to Taiwanese?
First, Lai must instruct all government departments and state-owned media to refer to Taiwan’s national team as “Team Taiwan” and stop using “Chinese Taipei.”
Second, the law must be amended, and officials and the public must work in unison to show the nation’s determination to rectify the name of the Taiwanese team.
There is hope that such activities will give the Japanese government a reason to help Taiwan and start calling its team Team Taiwan, beginning with the Tokyo Olympics.
The gods help those who help themselves, and it is about time that the government started to take action.
Christian Fan Jiang is a director of the Northern Taiwan Society.
Translated by Edward Jones
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this