Ambassador José María Liu
Representative / Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Spain
China’s continuing military threats on Taiwan – such as the recent incursion of 39 Chinese military aircraft into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on 23 January – are not only sowing uncertainty throughout the Indo-Pacific region, but are having an expected side-effect: a growing awareness of Taiwanese identity among the Taiwanese people. Indeed, a recent opinion poll reveals that more than 90 percent of Taiwan’s 23.5 million people identify themselves as “Taiwanese”. And less than 5 percent identify themselves solely and exclusively as “Chinese”.
This has had much to do not only with the military threats of recent years, but also with China’s other authoritarian behaviour, such as its refusal to allow Taiwan to join international organisations, its pressure to prevent Taiwanese athletes from collecting their gold medals under our flag and national anthem at the Olympic Games, and the Beijing government’s undermining of democracy and freedoms in Hong Kong.
The latest and most recent episode has been its pressure on Lithuania, which, having taken the courageous step of opening a representative office under the name of the Taiwanese Representative Office’, has immediately received condemnation and threats from China. Fortunately, we Taiwanese have valuable allies in the international community who speak out on our behalf. A European Parliament resolution of 20 January condemns the violations of fundamental freedoms in Hong Kong and shows the EU’s support for the development of relations between Taiwan and Lithuania.
More than 90% of Taiwanese have their roots on the Chinese mainland, but as long as China continues to bully us, we Taiwanese will feel more and more distant from this dictatorial regime, more aware of the need to reclaim our sovereignty and more in love with universal values such as freedom, democracy and human rights. And above all, fleeing from that “unbearable lightness of being” of which Milan Kundera spoke in his novel, we will be increasingly aware of our identity and feel more Taiwanese than ever.
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