Taiwan independence advocates at a rally in Taipei yesterday demanded that the government take action to assert national sovereignty and engage in international diplomacy by using the name “Taiwan.”
Led by Taiwan Republic Office director Chilly Chen (陳峻涵), members of pro-independence groups gathered outside the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) headquarters in the wake of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remark last week that “Taiwan has not been a part of China.”
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and the DPP government must seize this opportunity to change the nation’s name to “Taiwan,” discard the “Republic of China”(ROC) title and establish diplomatic relations with other countries, they said.
Photo: Jason Pan
Pompeo and the US administration have shown solid support for Taiwan, and backed up their words with actions to oppose China’s rising hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region, Chen said.
“Taiwan has not been a part of China, and that was recognized with the work that the [former US president Ronald] Reagan administration did to lay out the policy that the United States has adhered to now for three-and-a-half decades,” Pompeo said during a telephone interview on the Hugh Hewitt Show.
However, “we are disappointed by the DPP government and Tsai’s inaction on this, as they continue to cling to the ROC name, and only talk of Taiwan on rare occasions. They have spurned the good intentions of [US President Donald] Trump and Pompeo in their solid support for Taiwan as they have pushed the US government for more favorable policies for Taiwan,” Chen said.
This is the right time to make the name change, “starting with Taiwan as our nation’s name and putting the ROC into the dustbin of history,” he said.
There are also rising voices in the US for Washington to recognize Taiwan’s national sovereignty as a distinct and separate nation from China, he added.
“In our society we have the highest-ever percentage of people identifying as Taiwanese, with those identifying as Chinese sinking to only a single-digit percentage,” Chen said.
“Pompeo’s remark ... also meant to state that ‘Taiwan is not a part of the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and also not a part of the ROC.’ Therefore it is time for the government to declare this to the world,” he said.
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