Tennis player Chan Yung-jan (詹詠然), who is also known as Latisha Chan, on Tuesday protested against the organizer of the Yinzhou Bank International Women’s Tennis Open in Ningbo, China, for introducing her as an athlete from the “District of Taiwan in China,” adding that she would take the incident to a higher authority if the organizer makes the same mistake again.
The competition is part of an international series of professional women’s tennis tournaments organized by the Women’s Tennis Association.
“I am not a person with strong political convictions and am not interested in politics,” Chan said on her Facebook page. “But when I heard the host introduce me as an athlete from the ‘District of Taiwan in China,’ I felt really uneasy. Please don’t say that I’m from China. I am TAIWANESE, [and] represent [the team of] Chinese Taipei. I have already protested the statement to the chief umpire. If I hear it again, I’m afraid that I will need to take this matter to a higher authority.”
Chan said that people can tell that she is on the Chinese Taipei team from the “TPE” abbreviation listed after her full name on the draw that determines the sequence of competition.
She said she hoped that everyone can respect this, regardless of which country she visits.
Chan added that she did not want to generate any political controversy.
She said she was just a tennis player traveling around the world and trying to make her tennis dream come true.
“There is nothing political in my travel bag,” she said.
A similar incident happened in July when tennis player Hsieh Su-wei (謝淑薇) won the nation’s first senior Grand Slam title in the women’s doubles at Wimbledon.
Hsieh’s Chinese doubles partner Peng Shuai (彭帥) was reported to have interrupted an interview with Hsieh following their historic triumph, saying that she cannot accept the statement Taiwan is a country.
Unlike Chan, Hsieh skillfully dodged the question from the Taiwanese media about her reaction to Peng’s comments, saying that she was really happy at the interview and “did not think too much about it.”
As of press time, Chan’s posts on her Facebook page had attracted hundreds of responses from netizens, with Chinese and Taiwanese netizens engaging in discussions over the proper way to address the athlete.
A Taiwanese netizen named Fox Su said that Taiwan was forced to adopt the name “Chinese Taipei” because of the political pressure from China.
“What the athlete wants is respect,” Su said. “We reluctantly accept the name Chinese Taipei because of pressure from China. If they are going to take this away from us too, it shows that they do not have respect for us.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching