China says Taiwan was always part of it, but an old stamp shows a telling propaganda snafu

PHILATELY WON'T GET YOU ANYWHERE

Quartz
Date: September 2, 2019
By: Ilaria Maria Sala

If you were to rely on the official Chinese version of events, the island off the southern coast of Fujian province, Taiwan, has “always been part of China.”

The website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, for example, proclaims: “Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times,” and then sets out a series of dates and events meant to prove the point, while conspicuously sidestepping the issue of exactly what constituted “China” in “ancient times.” The argument is one China has been making with growing force in recent times, and that many Chinese abroad feel it is their duty to make too.

This week, China is in the middle of a campaign “to promote people’s knowledge of the national map and awareness of national territory. ” With the pithy theme of “Regulate the usage of maps, no dot on it can be mistaken,” this activity is so avowedly politicized that the article cites Ge Yuejing, a professor at Beijing Normal University’s geography school, as saying that “national map education should be included in ideological and political education as well as geography classes.”

Chinese nationalistic outrage over Taiwan—which has never been governed by the Communist Party that rules over the Chinese mainland—has in recent years seen a professor at Australia’s University of Newcastle made to apologize for saying that Taiwan was a country. Last year, airlines had to change how they displayed Taiwan in their ticketing menus to passengers. And this year the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences proposed that all international companies, including the likes of Apple and Nike, be urged to refer to Taiwan as part of China’s territory, while the London School of Economics also came under pressure after a campus artwork, a giant globe of the world, showed Taiwan as separate.

But the past has seen the occasional telling slip in the official line.    [FULL  STORY]