Despite all the talk, all the late night sweats in Beijing, and all the curses from VPN-lagging China-based twitterers; it turns out Twitter and the PRC see more eye-to-eye than either side would have you believe.
The following is a screen capture by Nick (@riceagain), a Kiwi splitting his time between Taiwan and the Mainland, who noticed a peculiar phrasing when attempting to set the Twitter tweet location to “Taiwan”:
What can one really say about that but, wow. Twitter, you may have just hurt the feelings of 23 million people, but endeared yourself to 1.3 billion … who can’t use your service.
Haha..Nice try Twitter… this ass-kissing isn’t gonna get you unblocked in China.
Well, the mainland is also just a part of China that is temperorily and very unfortunately under CPC control
A thumb-up!
The Pan-Blue Coalition on Taiwan doesn’t dispute that — their official stance is also one China — only which China.
A fair point, particularly considering who is governing that province at the moment. Still, it’s hard to think of Taiwan as “just a province” when it has its own government, monetary system, military, etc.
Apparently it depends on where you try it. As I tried in HK, Taiwan is still Republic of China.
It would be clever if it was based on location, and in-China people saw “province of…”, but nobody would actually see that, as it would all be through a VPN. However, such isn’t the case — looks like the support request to change this got some traction, as it’s now changed.
Well, as a long term Taiwan resident, this defintion really sticks in my craw, but in some respects it is correct.
The government of Taiwan is in fact the Republic of China (ROC not PRC), and the island of Taiwan is one of the provinces that make up the territory, with the outlying islands making up the other provinces. Previously, mainland provinces fell under the jurisdiction of the ROC, but the claim to them has been dropped.
Of course, to an English speaker, the obvious implication of “Taiwan, Province of China†is that Taiwan is a province of the PRC, which is of course complete nonsense.
TW status was left paradoxically unsettled post-war. ROC-Gov-in-exile’s entrance/existance has been a six decade disaster. And it’s in multiple facets.
I think they are simply using the ISO standard for country names, ä¸è¦èƒ¡æ€ä¹±æƒ³ã€‚“Taiwan is listed as “Taiwan, Province of China” because of its political status within the United Nations: The UN does not recognize the Republic of China which governs Taiwan and considers the territory to be part of the People’s Republic of China.†From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1