The Academia Sinica on March 8 announced that Yang An-suei (楊安綏) and his team had in 19 days developed a diagnostic reagent that can identify SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — in as few as 15 minutes.
As Taiwanese celebrated the breakthrough, China claimed credit at a WHO meeting, saying that the development was the outcome of dozens of “mutual reports” between the “Chinese central government” and “the Chinese province of Taiwan.”
APPALLING BEHAVIOR
This shameless behavior angered many Taiwanese. The Chinese Communist Party has always believed that repeating a lie a thousand times would make it true, which is particularly appalling.
Many people might think that the concept of the “Taiwan Province” ended in 1997, when the provincial government was frozen. However, any Taiwanese looking at the birthplace in their passport will see that if they were born in one of the six special municipalities — Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung — that city is given as their birthplace.
However, if they were not born in those cities, but in, for example, Keelung, Hsinchu, Chiayi, Hualien or Penghu, “Taiwan” is listed as their birthplace.
As for people born in Kinmen and Matsu, they are recorded as being born in Fujian Province, also referred to as Fukien.
Since a special municipality and a province are on the same level in the governmental structure, Taiwan and Fujian in the passport are of course references to provinces.
FROZEN PROVINCES
The administrative regions “Taiwan Province” and “Fujian Province” still exist, but without receiving a budget, they are frozen. They are in effect two corpses that remain within Taiwan’s legal framework.
The legal basis comes from Article 3 of the Local Government Act (地方制度法): “The local governments are subdivided into the provincial government and special municipalities ... the province is subdivided into counties and cities.”
So far, “Taiwan Province” has jurisdiction over the “provincial cities” Keelung, Hsinchu and Chiayi, as well as the three counties. Whenever China belittles Taiwanese by using the name “Taiwan Province,” Taiwanese cannot even shout back that there is no such place as “Taiwan Province.” This is frustrating.
The local government division is a matter of Taiwan’s domestic affairs, and the Local Government Act is domestic law, which can be reviewed and amended by the government.
The Republic of China on Taiwan is a small country with several provinces, and it is no longer appropriate to think of the scale of a province in terms of a pre-1949 map of China.
Belgium is similar in size to Taiwan, and it has 10 provinces and a capital region. Taiwan’s executive and legislative branches should think of Taiwan as a small country and design a local government structure suitable for this country.
LEGAL CHANGES
The expression “top-selling product available across the province” (全省熱賣中) often appears in advertising, describing Taiwan as a province. This is no different from the Chinese point of view.
Taiwan should amend relevant laws and regulations and restructure the counties and municipalities as “provinces,” so that the term “Taiwan Province” will finally disappear.
Allen Hertzberger lives in Germany and is the former coordinator of National Taiwan University’s women’s and gender studies program.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
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