The US-based Foreign Policy magazine recently took issue with some foreign media’s use of the term “renegade province” to refer to Taiwan, saying that neither Taipei nor Beijing employs that phrase.
In an article titled “Stop Calling Taiwan a ‘Renegade Province,’” Foreign Policy Asia editor Isaac Stone Fish on Friday last week said that many stories in Western news outlets had been referring to Taiwan as a renegade province in their reporting of the presidential election on Saturday.
In their recent reports, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal both said that Beijing sees Taiwan as a “renegade province,” Fish said.
Such a term was also employed by the Washington Post, The Associated Press, Time and Bloomberg, among others, he said.
“That is a mistake,” Fish said.
Since the Republic of China government fled China in 1949, the status of Taiwan has been an open question, but, “one thing it most certainly isn’t is a ‘renegade province,’” he said.
He said the term is nonexistent in China, either in an English or a Chinese connotation.
“The Chinese don’t use the term for the simple reason that they don’t consider Taiwan a renegade province,” Fish said.
“They consider Taiwan a province pretending that it’s independent” and most Chinese references to Taiwan are as such, he said, citing Chinese academics.
“We never used the English term ‘renegade province,’” Shen Dingli (沈丁立), vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at China’s Fudan University, was quoted as saying in the article.
US-based Chinese academic Yu Maochun (余茂春) said in the article that the term was coined by Westerners and that he had never heard any Chinese official designating Taiwan as a renegade province.
Taiwan considers itself “a sovereign state,” Representative to the US Shen Lyu-shun (沈呂巡) was quoted as saying in the article.
The issue gets more complicated in the field of international diplomacy, Fish said. For example, he said, the IMF uses the term “Taiwan, Province of China”; the International Olympic Committee calls it “Chinese Taipei”; Washington calls it Taiwan; and Beijing often calls it “Taiwan province.”
Compared with “Taiwan, province of China, we prefer Chinese Taipei. We don’t like it, but we live with it,” Shen said in the article.
Fish said it was unclear when the phrase “renegade province” in reference to Taiwan first materialized in English. He said that the earliest record he was able to find was in a 1973 article in Encounter, a literary magazine cofounded by US journalist Irving Kristol, and that the usage did not take off until the early 1980s.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS