Amid controversy surrounding Germany’s labeling of Taiwan as part of China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that it had become aware of the situation in June, raising the issue with Germany and receiving a positive response.
The nationality issue caught public attention when a Taiwanese national working as an intern in Germany posted a message on Facebook saying that his nationality was labeled as “479 chinesisch” — with the number “479” being the nationality code for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and chinesisch meaning “Chinese” in German.
The man said he then asked a German colleague to help him rectify the record.
However, the German government told them that the code for Taiwan had been canceled at the beginning of the year, and all Taiwanese nationals were to be labeled with the code for the PRC and as “Chinese.”
The ministry said yesterday that it had received several complaints in June and protested to the German government, which responded positively.
“We contacted our representative office in Germany as well as several German government agencies as soon as we received complaints back in June,” ministry spokesperson Anna Kao (高安) said. “As a federal country, it may take longer for Germany to handle the issue.”
A unnamed ministry official said that there had been a separate code of “465” for Taiwan which was canceled in 2011, but the code had been reactivated following the ministry’s intervention.
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:
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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