Stop Calling Taiwan a Renegade Province BY ISAAC STONE FISH JANUARY 15, 2016

Beijing and Taipei don't think it is. Why does the rest of the world?
The World Bank sometimes calls it Taiwan District. The International Monetary Fund
prefers the declarative Taiwan Province of China. The International Olympic Committee
calls it Chinese Taipei. Taipei calls it the Republic of China. Washington just calls it
Taiwan and hopes no one asks any follow-up questions. Beijing often stubbornly calls it
Taiwan province, perhaps hoping that repeating that phrase will make it true. But one
phrase seems to exist solely in newspapers and magazines across the English-speaking
world: renegade province. Many articles about Taiwans upcoming Jan. 16 presidential
election an election that could have a major effect on the self-governing islands
relationship with China and the United States rely on the phrase renegade province to
describe Beijings views of Taiwan.
That is a mistake. Ever since Gen. Chiang Kai-shek fled mainland China in 1949, the status
of the midsize island of Taiwan has been an open question. But one thing it most certainly
isnt is a renegade province. And yet, the term persists. Beijing has never renounced the
use of force to bring the island of 23 million people, which it calls a renegade province,
back under its control, Reuters stated in early January, while the Wall Street
Journal wrotein late December 2015, Beijing sees the island as a renegade province but
Washington is obliged by U.S. law to help defend it. The Washington Post, the Associated
Press, the Los Angeles Times, Time, and Bloomberg, among other news outlets, have all
employed the term recently. (Ashamedly, Ive used it in this article here.)
But that term is almost nonexistent in China, either in an English or a Chinese incarnation.
We never used the English term renegade province, Shen Dingli, the deputy dean of
Fudan Universitys Institute of International Studies, told me. This is a term coined by
Westerners. Maochun Yu, a Chinese scholar in the United States, concurs. I have never
heard any mainland official designating Taiwan as a renegade province, he said.
The Chinese dont use the term for the simple reason that they dont consider Taiwan a
renegade province. They consider it a province pretending that its independent not
unlike the protagonist of Ambrose Bierces 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge, who daydreams at the gallows that he will be saved, while the noose slowly
tightens around his neck.
Most Chinese references to Taiwan refer to it as a province, plain and simple.
Chinese state media will often add quotation marks around examples of Taiwan exercising
democracy, as if to belittle it.
Chinese state media will often add quotation marks around examples of Taiwan exercising
democracy, as if to belittle it. The controversy over the election is
unceasing, sneered one December 2015 China Newsarticle about Taiwans upcoming
presidential election. A Jan. 5 article published on the news portal China.com stated that the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate for president, Tsai Ing-wen, is leading in
the polls by more than 20 percent.
Meanwhile, instead of president, Chinese state media will often use the term leader.
(During the November meeting of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Taiwanese President
Ma Ying-jeou, the first time the leaders of the governments on both sides of the Taiwan
Strait had met since 1949, they referred to each other as mister.) And instead of
government, Chinese often use the term authorities. Baike, a Chinese website resembling
Wikipedia, has a page titled Taiwanese Authorities, which it defines as the
administrative department currently controlling Chinas Taiwan District. When theyre
feeling polite, sometimes theyll just refer to Taiwan as an island.
Unsurprisingly, the Taiwanese dont call themselves or consider themselves a renegade
province either. How could you call us a renegade province? Lyushun Shen, the
representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United
States, asked me rhetorically. Yes, he admitted, China is much bigger: by land 266 times
larger, by population 58 times larger, but as a market for American goods, only four to five
times larger, Shen, who with his position functions as the de facto Taiwanese ambassador
to the United States, told me. Can you call us a small, tiny, dinky, remote renegade
province? he said. We are too big to ignore. So what does Taiwan consider itself? A
sovereign state, he said proudly.
Those who support Taiwans self-determination dont like the term either. Renegade
suggests that it was completely part of China and just decided to up and leave, said Perry
Link, a longtime China scholar and human rights advocate. The mainland Chinese
government fully annexed Taiwan in 1887 and ruled it until 1895, when the Japanese took
over; it ruled Taiwan from 1945 to 1949 the years between the end of the second Sino-
Japanese War and the Communists defeat of the Nationalists, Link said. I think most
Westerners see Taiwan as a long-standing part of China, but it has been fully ruled by the
mainland for only roughly a dozen years, Link added.
In the field of international diplomacy, it gets even more complicated. We prefer Chinese
Taipei, Shen said. We dont like it, but we live with it. One bright side of Chinese
Taipei: the spelling. Mainland Chinese use a system for transcribing Chinese words into
English letters called Pinyin, while Taiwan uses a system called Wade-Giles. Taipei is the
Taiwanese spelling; Beijing prefers Taibei, the Pinyin version. Chinese Taipei is certainly
less clumsy than the IMFs preferred phrase. Consider the following sentence, from a June
2015 IMF paper: Only a few European economies and Korea and Taiwan Province of
China reached high-income status during 1970-2010. Its unappealing and inaccurate
verbal gymnastics describing Taiwan as what Beijing wants it to be, instead of what it is.
The other bright side to the compromise inherent in the name Chinese Taipei is that Taiwan
gets to participate in these international organizations at all. Most important international
organizations, following Beijings lead, relegate Taiwan to observer status or refuse it the
ability to participate at all.
That Beijing and Taipei sit in the same international organizations at all is partially a result
of relations that have warmed considerably since Ma took office in 2008, and that are better
than at any time since 1949. Thats reflected in the language Beijing has used to refer to
Taiwan over the decades. Because both sides care about their legitimacy, in the early days
each demonized the other side as not legitimate, Shen Dingli, of Fudan University, said.
They called usgongfei, or Communist bandits, and we called themjiangfeibang, Chiangs
Bandit Clique.
They called us gongfei, or Communist bandits, and we called them jiangfeibang, Chiangs
Bandit Clique. (Trust me: It sounds meaner in Chinese.) Chinese state media frequently
used to drop in the wordwei, which means illegitimate or false, as in the phrase, Taiwans
illegitimate president. But now we want to win the hearts of Taiwan, said Shen. Thats
why we dont call them renegade.
Its unclear when the phrase renegade province in reference to Taiwan first materialized
in English. The earliest I was able to find came from a 1973 article in Encounter, a literary
magazine co-founded by American journalist Irving Kristol (a publication that, in an almost
certainly unrelated historical quirk, was later revealed to have received covert funding from
the CIA). The sentence, in full, is: In short, the Eastern sense of history, which embraces
centuries not puny little years, has clearly consigned the military conquest of Taiwan to
limbo and is aiming at a gradual peaceful absorption of the renegade province. Usage
didnt take off until the early 1980s: The New York Times first used it in 1982, according to
its website, and the search engine LexisNexis shows dozens of results for the rest of that
decade.
One of the few people to use the term renegade province in Chinese is Kuo Kuan-ying,
who in 2009 was fired from his job as a Taiwanese diplomat in China after writing a series
of articles critical of Taiwan, including one that claimed Taiwan is only a renegade
province of China. (Google Taiwan and renegade province in Chinese, and most of
the first results are Chinese media covering that particular story.) Much of the rest of the
Chinese stories are the Chinese websites of Western media outlets, like Reuters and
theFinancial Times.
In late December, Beijing warned of complex changes in Taiwan in 2016. Indeed, the
complicated swirl that this year could bring may include Taipeis angering Beijing by
keeping its distance. Hopefully, it will also bring an end to the phrase renegade province.