Yes, Taiwan is in the Olympics. How the Winter Games play into uneasy relations with China
- Taiwan is participating in the Winter Olympics under the name 'Chinese Taipei'.
- Despite the t, there have been no major hiccups between the two rivals.
- Taiwanese officials wanted to skip the opening ceremony but reversed course after IOC pressure.
TAIPEI – Chen Yi-guang cringes at the name "Chinese Taipei" for his Olympic team. But like a lot of his fellow Taiwanese, he wants athletes from the island to keep showing up on the world stage every two years and have a rare chance to beat rival China on its own turf as the Winter Games unfold in Beijing.
So the retired financial professional, 53, grudgingly goes along with it.
"The label 'Chinese Taipei' is one of those things like a birthday name that one is born with," he said, meaning that it can be difficult to change straight away.
When 19-year-old Lee Wen-Yi – Taiwan's first ever female Olympic Alpine skier – finished her last Alpine skiing run Wednesday in the women's slalom, it marked the end of Taiwan's participation in the Winter Games. None of the five athletes who came from the island nation, including Lee, have any more competitions.
But while the delegation avoided talking to the western media – several requests for interviews by Paste BN went unanswered – their presence did not go completely without notice or controversy.
Taiwanese speedskater Huang Yu-ting got raked on social media after a video posted on Instagram showed her wearing the Chinese team uniform during practice before the Games started, according to the Taipei Times. And Taiwanese officials reversed their decision to skip Friday's opening ceremony, saying they were pressured to do so by the IOC.
A tense, uneasy relationship
The incidents underscore the uneasy and awkward maneuvering that confronted Taiwanese athletes during the Winter Games: they competed in a country that doesn't recognize their independence while at the same time they tried to make a positive impression with the fans back home.
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China's government claims sovereignty over self-ruled Taiwan, and uses its global clout to require that the International Olympic Committee let the territory join Olympic events only as "Chinese Taipei" because, the label implies a link to China.
Beijing has claimed democratic Taiwan as part of its territory since the Chinese civil war of the 1940s, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists lost to Mao Zedong’s Communists and rebased their government in Taiwan. China has not dropped the threat of force, if needed, to unite the two sides and since mid-2020 has flown military planes over a corner of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone almost daily to signal its resolve.
Today, Taiwan, pressured by China, is recognized as a sovereign and independent country by just 13 out of 193 United Nations member countries. It cannot join international organizations such as the UN, or its specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization.
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The Biden administration has vowed to respond to any Chinese attack on Taiwan, which sits off the coast of mainland China. For decades the U.S. position on the territory has been summed up as "strategic ambiguity." Yet in recent years the U.S. has stepped up the transit of American warships through the Taiwan Strait and Washington is the island's biggest arms supplier.
"U.S. officials prize Taiwan as a close economic partner and key supplier of semiconductors (a key component in many electronics devices), a staunch political supporter of the U.S. and a counterweight to China’s rise in Asia," said Denny Roy, a senior fellow at the East-West Center foreign affairs think tank in Honolulu.
Medals trump labels to Taiwanese
Most Taiwanese, like Chen, have long tolerated the Chinese Taipei name and a list of other rules and concessions in place since 1981, as part of an International Olympic Committee-recognized compromise with China to let each side send its own teams to all events. This year's Games, which run through Feb. 20, is no different.
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Taiwanese Olympic teams bore a white-colored Chinese Taipei flag on their uniforms with a five-petal flower in the center instead of Taiwan’s official banner. The national anthem is banned from the Games, though organizers at the Tokyo Summer Olympics allowed it to be broadcast as part of a victory celebration after the Taiwanese team beat the Chinese team in the men’s badminton doubles gold medal match – although the anthem's lyrics were changed for the performance.
Chen Yi-fan, a professor of international relations at Tamkang University near Taipei, said that for many Taiwanese, "winning medals for Taiwan" and for their own glory is more significant" than political equality with China.
In fact, Taiwanese voters turned down a proposed Olympics name change to "Taiwan" by 55.9% to 45.2% in a 2018 island-wide referendum. Those polled cared more that Taiwan was able to chase medals and get precious exposure on world TV. They may also have wanted to avoid antagonizing China, which has an estimated 2,000 ballistic missiles directly aimed at the island territory, according to Taiwan's military.
"For Taiwan, it’s a good thing when more people begin to question China’s preferred narrative and the strictures placed on Taiwan’s global engagement," said Michael Mazza, an expert on China-Taiwan relations at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based international affairs think tank.
"Defeating a Chinese athlete would also be an affirmation of Taiwan’s way of life, overcoming China’s advantages of much larger population size and a much more rigorous state-supported effort to develop Olympic champion athletes," added Roy, who specializes in Asian security affairs.
Subtropical Taiwan entered just two ice skaters and one luger in the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia, followed by three skaters and the same luger, Lien Te-an, in 2018 in South Korea's host city, Pyeongchang. No one got a medal. But 68 Taiwanese athletes won a team record of 12 medals in the 2021 Tokyo Summer Olympics.
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For Beijing this year, Taiwan sent a speed skater for the women's 500-meter, 1,000-meter and 1,500-meter races, two skiers – one apiece for the men's and women's slalom – and a contestant for the women's luge singles. In contrast, China entered one female luger, five female speed skaters and two skiers each for the men's and women's slalom.
A boycott with few teeth
Like a number of western nations, including the U.S., Taiwan announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Games. But because China doesn't officially recognize a government in Taiwan it would never accede to hosting its senior officials in the first place. Lower-ranking officials have attended previous Olympic Games.
And backers of the boycott, such as the U.S., Australia, Canada and the U.K, have singled out allegations that Beijing is forcibly attempting to assimilate Muslim Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region as the reason for the boycott, not China's designs on Taiwan. Beijing angrily rejects allegations that it is acting improperly against Uyghurs.
In fact, Taiwan’s participation follows the trend around Asia where countries normally reject the Olympics as a political event and hope to get along with China. Japan is the only Asian country that has qualified for the Games that won’t be sending officials.
Chinese economic clout in Asia stops some governments from announcing boycotts, said James Gomez, regional director of the Asia Center, a Bangkok-based think tank. Countries throughout Southeast Asia look to China’s $15.6 trillion economy as an irreplaceable market for exports and source of direct investment.
A "fear of further sanctions" has, for example, defined South Korea’s recent relationship with China and may explain its unwillingness to boycott the Games, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank said in a January 13 study.
After South Korea installed a U.S.-backed anti-missile system in 2016 against Beijing's wishes, the study notes, Chinese tourism to South Korea and imports of Korean cultural products were suddenly called off as as China imposed economic sanctions on Seoul. The sanctions caused a nearly $16 billion loss to South Korea's tourism industry alone, the think tank says.
But in Taiwan, the concessions to China also show signs of wearing thin.
More than four in five Taiwanese told government surveys in 2019 that they oppose unification with China, and younger people have said they feel increasingly distant culturally from the other side. More than 65% of Taiwanese prefer the name "Taiwan Team" while just 1.9% back the name Chinese Taipei, the Taiwan New Constitution Foundation, a political advocacy group, found in an opinion poll in August.
Sean Su, 38, a political commentator for Taiwanese radio, said before the Olympics began that he planned to avoid watching broadcasts of the Winter Games in Beijing.
He not only disputes the pick of Beijing for the event, given China's human rights record, but notes that the Chinese capital hosted the summer Games in 2008 as well. He fears China might use this year’s event to make Taiwanese athletes appear behind China’s team in ceremonial events or let announcers call Taiwan a Chinese "province."
"Will they harm Taiwan's Olympians?" he said. "That would not be a wise PR move."
Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard in Beijing, the Associated Press