Show many Taiwanese the official list, and they squint and look perplexed. Some shrug their shoulders or scratch their heads as they search in vain for a familiar name.
Yet when China's national legislature convenes in Beijing next week to approve the country's new leadership lineup, the 13 people on that list will be the only representatives of Taiwan.
But the citizens of the ROC on Taiwan had nothing to do with picking delegates for China's annual National People's Congress. Beijing did it for them.
None of the delegates lives on Taiwan and most have never even visited.
The selection of non-Taiwanese for the so-called Taiwan delegation illustrates how far China will go to bolster its claims of sovereignty over the country.
"Saying that these people can represent Taiwan is extremely laughable," said Straits Exchange Foundation Deputy Secretary General Yan Wan-jing (
"Taiwan is a democratic society," said the normally easygoing Yan, his voice raising with each sentence.
"So people who represent the Taiwanese should go through a democratic process before they are selected," Yan said.
Few are that vehement; most simply dismiss the delegates as an irrelevant quirk of Taiwan-China relations. That was the general sentiment last week at the Washington Barbershop, a cramped, old-fashioned place in downtown Taipei where haircutters don't sterilize combs between customers.
"Ah, they can do what they want. Most people here don't care about that meeting in Beijing anyway," said one barber, who only gave his surname, Wu.
As he shaved a businessman's cheek, another barber yelled out, "We've got democracy and they're still communist. It has nothing to do with us."
Others looked up from news-papers and nodded.
Even political activist Huang Hsien-jing -- part of a tiny minority of Taiwanese sympathetic to China's Communist Party -- is critical of the Taiwan delegation.
"These people are not qualified to represent Taiwan," said Huang, a carpenter and taxi driver who often organizes like-minded cabbies for protest convoys through Taipei with Chinese flags attached to their cars.
"But the communists have no other choice but to do it this way," he said. "The Taiwanese government would never allow any of its own people to go."
In Taiwan, obtaining information about Beijing's Taiwan delegates is difficult.
One official at the Chinese Cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office in Taipei said the representatives all live in China and were democratically elected by Taiwanese in China.
However, the official, who declined to give his name, refused to provide details about the selection process or background information about the delegates.
"More information will be available when the congress begins and the media can interview them," the official said.
When the delegates' names were announced in January, China's official Xinhua News Agency said in a brief report the group was among the highest educated of all delegations, with four members holding doctorate degrees.
Xinhua interviewed a delegate identified only as Liu Qi, a resident of Sichuan Province.
Liu, who has never visited Taiwan, said "he won't disappoint the expectations of the Taiwanese and he'll reflect the hopes of the great number of Taiwanese," Xinhua reported.
If China ever does decide to select a delegate truly from Taiwan, an obvious choice would be Lin Shu-yang (林書揚), the graying honorary chairman of the fringe Workers' Party.
RSS