In April 2019, an art installation of an upturned globe, entitled The World Turned Upside Down, by Mark Wallinger was unveiled outside the London School of Economics and Political Science. It caused an uproar, leading to university authorities asking Wallinger to make a change to the sculpture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs lodging a complaint with the university over its decision.
The controversy stemmed from the artist’s use of a different color to represent Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chinese students complained that the suggestion that Taiwan was not part of the PRC was offensive.
Was it all a storm in a teacup? The Chinese students did not think so. Nor did the ministry. Maps matter. They are a visual representation of an accepted version of territorial claim.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been changing maps and issuing new — Chinese — names for land in Tibet, and disputed areas on the border between China and India. It has also been aggressively pushing the notorious “nine-dash line” — now expanded to the “10-dash line — extending Chinese territory well beyond the maritime waters regarded as belonging to the PRC in international law, igniting sovereignty disputes with Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
Its insistence on Taiwan being represented as PRC territory on maps is another example of the delusion that led to the Chinese nationals’ response to Wallinger’s globe.
The changing of names and rewriting of maps percolate in the background, infiltrating public and institutional awareness of territorial understanding and laying the groundwork for pushing territorial claims in legal initiatives and historical accounts. State recognition of other states might not be overtly and directly impacted, but it is a mistake to underestimate the power of the narrative underpinning the concept.
It is within this context that we must understand the “Honest Maps” amendment passed by the US House of Representatives on Friday last week, which bans the US Department of Defense from creating, buying or displaying any map showing Taiwan or its outlying islands as part of the PRC.
Calling the US’ “one China policy” “an antiquated and dishonest policy,” US Representative Tom Tiffany, who proposed the amendment, said that it would ensure US maps reflect the reality that “China is China, and Taiwan is Taiwan.”
While we rankle at the lack of recognition of the reality of Taiwan’s sovereign and independent status in any aspect other than the reality-distortion bubble that the CCP enforces upon the world with its “one China principle,” we do recognize the realpolitik necessity of other nations paying lip service to the policy even when their actions suggest they believe, and proceed, in the full realization that Taiwan is not subordinate to the PRC or the CCP in any way. We do this while having to continually emphasize, as US officials have started doing with more clarity and regularity, that the US’ consistent position on its “one China” policy is to “acknowledge,” not “recognize” the PRC’s territorial claim over Taiwan. That is, “we know you think that, but we don’t.”
There is no need to provoke the CCP into having a truculent fit over members of the international community explicitly clarifying the real nature of their relationship with Taiwan or their understanding of its sovereign, independent status. What Taiwan needs to do is to work to ensure that their indulgence of the CCP’s distortions do not impede Taiwan’s activity in the international space, and that the situation is not allowed to advance to a point in which the CCP perceives military action to be the only option available, when all of its appeals to fake history and fabricated cartographical details have been disregarded by governments that prefer to conduct their relations in the real world.
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