Politicians of every stripe are up in arms against the Taiwan Fertilizer Company, a government enterprise diversifying its business to keep itself afloat. All of them have condemned Taifertilizer for selling in China purified water from the deep seas as a product made in "Taiwan, province of China." Crestfallen spokesmen for the state-owned firm have apologized, but the apology hasn't been accepted. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers want to call to account its board chairman Chung Yung-chi, who was vice president of the Legislative Yuan at one time.
In fact, Taifertilizer and Chung have fallen victim to Taiwan's collective "thymos syndrome." Thymos, often translated into English as spiritedness, drives people to seek glory and assert themselves for noble causes or makes them bristle with anger if others do not recognize their worth. They burn with thymotic anger. Our politicians, bitten by thymos bugs, are acting in their thymotic rage.
Of course, they are rightfully angry. How dare a state-owned company like Taifertilizer demean the Republic of China by subserviently calling it a province of China in order just to sell one of its byproducts on the other side of the Taiwan Strait? What else is more greedy a crime than this dreadful breach of the cardinal Confucian principle of the rectification of names? It is the People's Republic of China that claims the free and democratic island state of 23 million people as one of its provinces, a renegade province, at that, which has to be brought back to its Communist fold by force if necessary.
In their thymotic anger, our politicians have forgotten the United Nations, at the request of the PRC of course, officially designates Taiwan as a "province of China." On the other hand, Taiwan still remains a province of the Republic of China. Former President Lee Teng-hui started phasing out the province of Taiwan. No provincial assemblymen has been elected in the last 12 years, but the Taiwan provincial government still exists in name, though it has ceased to function since 1997. The government of the Republic of China claimed to represent the whole of China until 1991, and its constitution still claims the mainland of China as part of its territory. Theoretically, it isn't wrong to call Taiwan a province of China. It is wrong only if Taiwan is named a province of the People's Republic of China.
Inasmuch as Taifertilizer is concerned, the question is: "What's in the name?" The Chinese won't let it sell its purified water as a product made in the Republic of China. They require its origin stated as province of China. Otherwise, Taifertilizer's water cannot be sold on the mainland of China. The government-run industrial company has no option but to go along with Beijing to sell its water in China. A rectified name will end its water business with the PRC. The management whose chief concern is profit sees nothing is nominally wrong when it obeys Beijing's command.
A rose smells just as sweet, even if it isn't called a rose. We wish our politicians would be a little less thymotic and a little more pragmatic.
（本文刊載於98.06.09 China Post，本文代表作者個人意見）
胡思聰
(
2007年6月12日 09:50
)
林祖嘉
(
2018年4月17日 16:11
)
王順民
(
12月6日 16:45
)
張瑞雄
