, they seem to be willing to do anything that will cut Taiwan's historic links to the other side of the Taiwan Strait. Lately, the government has taken to changing the names of public institutions as a way of pleasing those who want to erase our historic links with China.
The funny thing is, the more names get changed, the more the new names start to resemble their counterparts in China.
For example, before the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport was renamed by the government last year, authorities in mainland China had always called the facility the "Taoyuan International Airport," in reference to its location.
Of course, mainland Chinese news media and airline pilots never dared speak the Chinese words for CKS because the airport's Chinese name used Chiang's honorific "Chung-cheng."
In mainland China, Chiang Kai-shek is called "Jiang Jieshi" to deliberately remove honorific references to the former anti-communist leader.
So now that the airport has been renamed the "Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport," we have essentially taken mainland China's name and made it our own.
Moving to the recently renamed "CPC Corp., Taiwan," which is the former Chinese Petroleum Corporation, and "CSBC Corp., Taiwan," which is the former China Shipbuilding Corporation, it would seem these names are a bit redundant, since the "C" in both names stands for "corporation."
It was a funny thing that when officials were asked about the apparent redundancy, we were told that major companies such as HSBC Corp. have similar names that are not thought to be redundant.
We have great respect for the international banking institution that in former times was known as the "Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation."
However, we are surprised to see our DPP-led government suddenly taking Hong Kong as a model, since we have heard from them so many times that Taiwan cannot be "Hong Kong-ized" and that Hong Kong is somehow a bad place.
The reason why the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation changed its name to HSBC Corp. was simple. The banking institution moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to London, the world's financial capital, and greatly expanded into international markets by acquiring overseas banking institutions.
Since it was becoming a neighborhood bank in places as diverse as New York State and Turkey, the bank decided to remove geographic references from its name.
We wonder if our own CSBC Corp., Taiwan now really intends to sweep the global ship construction market. Interestingly, the new Chinese name for CSBC Corp. literally means "Taiwan International Shipbuilding." It is also curious that our deep-green-minded government chose the "comma state name" format, i.e., "CPC Corp, Taiwan."
The "comma state name" format is something that our diplomats have argued about extensively whenever Beijing attempts to strong-arm international organizations not to admit Taiwan, or to give us an undignified name in exchange for staying. In major world organizations, Beijing endlessly pressures member states to refer to Taiwan as "Taiwan, China."
In the past, an effective guard against this policy was to adopt the name "Chinese-Taipei," deliberately written with a dash in the middle, rather than a comma, which signifies the former belongs to the latter.
It appears the DPP and its allies on the boards of directors in state-run companies are great admirers of Beijing's name games, and have shamelessly embraced the model for their new names.
Indeed, the DPP-led government has become highly skilled in changing the names of public institutions, as they have spent precious little time doing anything else for the past seven years.
Besides the bizarrely similar methodology between the DPP government and mainland China, we were also amazed by the way our state-run companies think about money. When Chunghwa Post (now Taiwan Post) chairman Lai Ching-chi was asked by reporters about how much it was going to cost the postal service to change signs, re-write contracts and issue new stamps, he informed the people of Taiwan that the name change cost was "only about NT$67 million."
Lai was trying to stress that the name change was not going to cost billions of NT dollars as claimed by the postal service's labor union.
However, Lai's comments show that NT$67 million is not thought of as a lot of money by high-ranking officers of our state-run corporations.
We wonder if it would behoove President Chen to appoint managers who do regard NT$67 million as being a lot of money, as indeed it is to the vast majority of people living in this country today.
