A close look at 'Chinese Taipei'

Let's go back to the year 1979 when Chinese Taipei was invented.

After Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek moved his Kuomintang (KMT) government from Nanjing to Taipei at the end of 1949, our top athletes started to have problems attending the Olympic Games. The People's Republic of China (PRC) Mao Zedong proclaimed a little earlier, on Oct. 1, insisted that its newly formed Olympic committee replace the one the generalissimo moved from China with his government.

For quite some time, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) didn't accede to Mao's demand. Then, Taiwan's Olympic committee was forced to change its name to the Republic of China Olympic Committee (ROCOC) in 1968. But our athletes, including decathlon champion C.K. Yang, represented the ROC (Republic of China) in the Rome and Tokyo Olympics in 1960 and 1968. Yang won China's first Olympic silver medal in Rome.

The PRC didn't like the ROCOC. So Beijing brought pressure on the IOC to oust the ROCOC in 1978. Lord Killanin, the then IOC president, tried to call a meeting in Lausanne in March of 1979 to solve the touchy question. The meeting was aborted because Beijing refused to accept an IOC mediation the ROCOC had recommended.

To be sure, the ROCOC was in an insoluble dilemma. It couldn't talk with the PRC Olympic Committee in Beijing, because President Chiang Ching-kuo allowed “no contact, no compromise and no negotiation” between Taiwan and China. On the other hand, it had to contact, negotiate and compromise with its Chinese counterpart, lest Taiwan be excluded from the Olympic Games.

When the IOC held its eighty-first annual assembly in Lausanne in April 1979, the ROCOC was asked to assume a new title of the National Olympic Committee Taiwan (China). Lord Killanin himself offered another name, Chinese Taiwan Olympic Committee. The ROCOC could not accept, for Chiang Ching-kuo forbade mention of Taiwan in lieu of the Republic of China. He could tolerate only “Taiwan, Republic of China.” He was allergic to the word Taiwan, which, to him, smacked of an independent island state.

A vote was taken on a proposal of names for the two committees at the Lausanne meeting on April 7. The IOC decided to acknowledge two Chinese Olympic committees. The one in the PRC would be known thereafter as the Chinese Olympic Committee, Peking (Beijing), and the other on Taiwan as the Chinese Olympic Committee, Taipei.

President Chiang Ching-kuo accepted the new name, but the PRC protested the arrangement. Beijing did not like either of the names, but decided not to boycott the 2000 Olympics.

The IOC decision, however, was reversed at San Juan, Puerto Rico. The IOC held four meetings at the Costa Rican capital from June 25 to 30, adopting the final ruling after a long debate that the committee in China is thereby formally recognized as the Chinese Olympic Committee and the other one in Taiwan as the Chinese Taipei Olympic Committee.

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