The US is diminishing Taiwan’s international status by taking down its flag from US government Web sites, US Representative Ted Yoho said on Sunday.
In an article titled “The Marginalization of Taiwan Must End” published in the National Interest magazine, Yoho said that what might seem a trivial move to remove the flag from the Web sites is actually detrimental to Taiwan and the US.
The removals started with the US Department of State taking down the flag from its Web site in September last year, followed by other US government agencies, he said.
The removal was not meaningless and “appears to be the result of a change in how the State Department handles some of the gray area in the US conception of ‘one China,’” Yoho said.
While US government officials have said the removals are not reflective of a new policy, but are consistent with a long-standing practice of not displaying flags of nations that the US does not have diplomatic relations with, he dismissed the explanation as false.
The move was the result of an update to a memo titled “Guidelines on Relations with Taiwan” issued in 2015, “which included a new rule prohibiting the display of Taiwan ‘symbols of sovereignty’ on US government Web sites or online accounts,” Yoho said.
This rule in effect hurts “Taiwan, the US national interest and the values we share,” he wrote.
For Taiwan, it minimizes the gray area in which the nation exists, because the People’s Republic of China is the sole government of “China” that the US and most nations in the world recognize, he added.
At stake is an “important and long-standing partner of the United States” and “an exemplar of democracy and human rights in a region short on both,” Yoho wrote.
Instead of minimizing this gray area, the US should be maximizing it, Yoho said adding that formalizing the removal of Taiwan’s symbols of sovereignty not only does the opposite, but sets “a dangerous precedent that others can be pressured to follow.”
While the US has been removing the flag from its Web sites, many nations and companies have been changing Taiwan’s designation on theirs.
Most recently, the Swedish Tax Agency on Feb. 28 announced that from March 12 Taiwan would be listed on its Web site as a province of China, instead of the Republic of China.
Malaysian airline AirAsia has chosen to list Taiwan as “Taiwan, China” on its Web site’s drop-down menus.
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