A petition launched last month by a Japanese researcher calling on the Japanese Ministry of Defense to redact a white paper listing Taiwan as part of China has garnered more than half of its goal of 2,500 signatures.
The petition — started on July 25 by Hideki Nagayama on Change.org — asks Japanese Minister of Defense Taro Kono to list Taiwan separately from China in its analysis of the nations’ military strength and defense policies, before the white paper is published later this month.
Nagayama wrote in the petition that Taiwan is always listed under sections on China, rather than on its own, as it is in reports from the US, Russia and other countries.
Photo: Screen grab from Change.org
China’s expressed ambition of invading Taiwan would be an illegal act, which the international community should work together to prevent, he wrote.
Publishing a government paper that describes Taiwan as part of China confuses the public into believing that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be an internal affair and that the international community should not interfere, he said.
The petition has also caught the attention of the Taiwan Association in Japan, whose president, Wang Shao-ying (王紹英), issued a statement in Japanese protesting the white paper’s references to Taiwan as a part of China.
Wang said that as a central government body, the ministry of “has a duty to provide the Japanese public with accurate international information, and should not employ incorrect maps and information to misguide Japanese nationals and harm the friendship between Taiwan and Japan.”
The association also called on the ministry to represent Taiwan separately in the white paper’s maps, and to give the nation its own chapters in the document.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also and asked the Japanese government correct the white paper.
It said it would keep an eye on developments and have its representative office in Japan press the Japanese government for a response.
As of 8:30pm last night 1,694 people had signed the petition.
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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