What is “Chinese Taipei”?

By J.Y.

ALMOST overlooked amid the flag-waving participants of the opening ceremony at the winter Olympics in February was a tiny delegation of four competitors walking behind a sign that was not the name of an actual country (pictured). “Chinese Taipei” are two words that have come to symbolise the diplomatic isolation of a prosperous island of 24m people. Using that name is the only way Taiwan can participate in many international organisations or events. And there are many such bodies in which the island still cannot take part at all. Why is this? And what does the phrase “Chinese Taipei” mean?

The Republic of China (ROC)—China’s official name after the fall of the imperial system in 1912—was an American ally in the war against Japan. But its leader Chiang Kai-shek lost the civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communists that followed, and in 1949 Chiang and his followers fled to Taiwan. The island inherited the ROC name, even as Mao founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland. The outbreak of the Korean war prevented Mao taking Taiwan, and the island became an America-backed bulwark against communism during the cold war. Initially authoritarian, Taiwan developed into a thriving market economy and eventually a democracy. But one of the conditions prior to Richard Nixon’s opening with Communist China in 1972 was that the United Nations switch its recognition from Taipei to Beijing. Ever since, the mainland has enforced its claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of China (including Taiwan) and has attempted to squeeze the island’s international space by keeping it out of the UN and its affiliated bodies. Taiwan now has diplomatic relations with only a handful of small countries, such as Burkina Faso and El Salvador.