Quote of the Week

From today's Taipei Times on the way the Ma administration suffered a diplomatic defeat for his 'modus vivendi' and 'win-win' when the UNFCC listed Taiwan participants at the Copenhagen climate summit as coming from China (not even Chinese Taipei):

Hsiao Hui-chuan (蕭慧娟), an executive secretary at the EPA responsible for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, said ITRI’s original application listed its address as “Hsinchu, R.O.C. (Taiwan).”

The information was then changed by the conference organizers without notifying the organization, she said. The minimum standard that would be acceptable to our government is ‘Chinese Taipei.’ The most ideal would, of course, be the ‘Republic of China,’” she said.

Meanwhile, the foreign ministry said not having a government official lead the delegation to Copenhagen was a way to safeguard Taiwan’s national dignity.

Ministry spokesman Henry Chen (陳銘政) said that since the UNFCCC still has ITRI listed as a non-governmental organization from “Hsinchu, China,” having a government official as the head delegate would indirectly legitimize the nomenclature that Taiwan is so strongly opposed to.

I would disagree that 'the most ideal standard' would be the Republic of China but then that is a party political position. During the Chen years, you would have seen the same sentence but with R.O.C replaced by 'Taiwan'. This is indicative of the China-centric mindset of this Government who are desperately trying to reinvigorate the ROC and undo all the gains of the DPP in making a majority of the population identify with 'Taiwan' as their country. Meanwhile, not having a Government officiallead the delegation safeguards the country's sovereignty since by making themselves invisible this is obviously going to raise the profile and influence of the R.O.C government on the world stage. Talk about trying to pull somehting good out of a debacle ... and failing spectacularly in a very ironic way. This is especially so since Henry Chen (陳銘政) identifies, perhaps inadvertently, the truth of the act that Taiwanese en masse object to being subsumed within China in the international community. They might reflect that a majority, since they don't want unification, might also object to the continuation of being subsumed within the R.O.C, defense of which has rapidly turned out to be less effective than standing up and being proud of being Taiwan and Taiwanese, even if it didn't get us into the UN. R.O.C effectively dies in 1971 but here we have the Ma Government trying to package old wine in new bottles to faciliate a bureaucratic transition from Taiwan (R.O.C) to R.O.C (Taiwan) to Taiwan (S.A.R)(P.R.C).