First post and hopefully not the last
My parents emigrated from Taiwan after college in order to come to the United States. Starting from when I was a toddler, I’ve since been back many times for a variety of reasons. Some of my best memories in life involve experiences in Taiwan, whether it be studying, working, doing research, or just doing touristy stuff. The primary purpose of starting this blog is to raise awareness of Taiwan, especially among English-speaking people. I think it's astounding how such an advanced country with a population of over 23 million and one of the top GDPs in the world has such a low profile. I can't count the number of where I brought up Taiwan to someone and had them confuse it with Thailand. It's understandable -- Thailand does have a larger population, but I still can't help but feel that when you take into account all the factors that make Taiwan special (technological contributions, beautiful green scenery, a strong democracy), Taiwan is woefully under-recognized.
There are probably many reasons for this lack of recognition. I remember I was talking about Taiwan to a friend once, when halfway through the conversation they asked me to why I didn’t visit Bangkok when I was there.
I think even I myself have been a cause of lack of awareness of Taiwan. Growing up, people would often ask: “What are you?” (I’m not sure if it’s just me getting older or times have changed, but this question strikes me as a bit politically incorrect now). To answer these people, I would always say “Chinese”, even though I identified with Taiwan as my “mother country”. After all, Taiwan is where my relatives all lived. I attended a high school with many other students whose parents were from Taiwan, and at that point in time they also identified themselves as Chinese. This trend is changing now, and more and more people are identifying themselves as “Taiwanese”. See here more information.
All things considered, I think the main reason that the general population has little awareness of Taiwan is due to the majority of countries in the world not recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation (and the number of countries that do is rapidly dropping -- much respect to the great nation of Burkina Faso for staying steadfast, unlike Costa Rica) . This manifests itself in so many different ways.
- Taiwan has repeatedly been denied entry into the United Nations. This really exposes how weak the United Nations is, that they refuse entry to a country with a strong democracy and a comparable population and GDP as Australia.
- For many years Taiwan denied entry into World Health Organization -- isolating them from the international medical community. Recently they were allowed to join, under the name “Chinese Taipei”.
Taiwan has very strong freedom of speech, arguably the strongest in Asia, so it's a travesty that it has so little recognition. Take this image (source):
We can see that in the sea of black, red, and orange that makes up Asia, Taiwan stands out as the lone country with a "Satisfactory Situation". Taiwan isn't perfect, but it still stands out as a beacon of democracy, self-rule, and freedom of speech in Asia.
I don’t want to get into a discussion about “One Country, Two Systems” --- there is enough of that on the web. I have heard the viewpoints of PRC (mainland China) friends on why Taiwan should be reunified with the mainland, and I also understand friends/family from Taiwan who wish to stay separate or even increase the distance between Taiwan and mainland China. For now, I want to just focus on 1) promoting more awareness of Taiwan as a great country/state/province (pick whatever least offends you!) to visit and 2) when applicable/noteworthy, to share interesting insights from my work (I am a data scientist).
I am pretty busy with work so don't plan to promote this blog too much, so hoping that Google/other search engines can just do their job and do a good job showing my blog if someone searches something. If you're somebody who has found this blog via a search by the time you read this I hope there will have been several more posts.
