Politics is the name of the Olympics game

#TaiwanWins, but the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has been fraught with anxieties about national identity and transitional justice

By Joanna Lee
 

The Taiwan – ‘Chinese Taipei’ – team bearing the plum blossom flag at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics opening ceremony.
Photo credit: Sports Administration, Ministry of Education

“What’s Chinese Taipei?”

It was the 2004 Athens Olympics, and I was a teenager growing up Taiwanese in Australia – a country still basking in the afterglow of being the previous host country. A mother and her child were seated next to me on the train, scanning through the list of countries in the Olympics medal tally. 

I looked over, wondering what his mother, an adult, would have to say. Instead, she shrugged; she genuinely had no idea.

No surprises there, I thought. After all, while others celebrated Australia’s wins, or even those of their migrant parents’ countries, the oddity of being from an ‘orphan’ state with a nonsensical name meant not so much national pride, but rather, an identity crisis of sorts.

It’s not a foreign feeling for most Taiwanese, with each passing edition of the Olympics being a bigger global spectacle than before – and especially as Taiwan’s national identity began to move away from its martial law legacy and into a new era of democracy.

For this year’s Tokyo Olympics, both the games and the name (of the Taiwan team, that is) are the same, but the tune being whistled – whether by athletes, spectators or governments themselves – feels decidedly different.

For starters, the nation’s Olympics mania has been in full swing, after a record medal haul: two gold, four silver and six bronze. Yet, beyond the love of the sport, it’s perhaps how the Taiwan team matched up to the other ‘Chinese’ team both literally and symbolically that really seized the nation.

One in three people in the nation reportedly tuned in to watch Taiwan badminton queen and world No. 1 champion Tai Tzu-ying (戴資穎) and her Chinese opponent Chen Yu-fei (陳雨菲) in the women’s singles final on 1 August. Meanwhile, when badminton duo Lee Yang (李洋) and Wang Chi-lin (王齊麟) secured their gold medal over the Chinese team in the men’s doubles final, their ‘hawkeye challenge’ match point became an instant viral sensation – and a kind of stand-in for new Taiwanese nationalism.
 

A limited edition iPass card design with the now viral matchpoint from the men’s badminton doubles final.
Photo credit: iPass 一卡通 

Lee Yang himself proclaimed pointedly in a Facebook post – one that also specifically mentions seeing the ‘Chinese Taipei’ flag and hearing the ‘Republic of China’ flag anthem – that he was dedicating his win to “my country: Taiwan”.

After losing to Lee and Wang, China’s Li Jun-hui, on the other hand, referred to the duo as “our Taipei, China team” in a congratulatory Weibo post. 

These respective word choices point to the ways in which the obfuscating and hyper-political name game has evolved – as well as something athletes are having to increasingly contend with in the contemporary world of global elite sports.

Taiwan is, of course, no stranger to the nuances behind names, given that the various monikers under which the nation’s Olympics team have competed have all vastly depended on shifting political tides. Since the 1956 Melbourne games, the Taiwan delegation has competed under ‘Formosa China’, ‘the Chinese Republic of Formosa’, ‘Taiwan’, ‘Republic of China’ and, finally, ‘Chinese Taipei’.

The name conundrum even culminated in a name-change referendum campaign in 2018, led by former Olympics medalist Chi Cheng (紀政), who had called the current ‘Chinese Taipei’ name an “injustice”.

Ahead of the vote, the IOC warned of possible loss of membership in future games should Taiwan push ahead with the name change, sparking a national debate on whether politics and sports should mix.

That sports and the struggle for national identity are entwined is an uncomfortable truth in Taiwan, one that goes all the way back to both Japanese and Kuomintang colonial periods.

Writing in the EAST Asian Sport Thoughts, National Taiwan Sport University academics Hwang Dong-jhy and Chiu Wei-cheng pointed to sports in Taiwan as a by-product of Japanese colonial rule. The government had introduced organised sporting activities in schools as a kind of trojan horse for rituals like flag-raising and military marches and anthems – “to secure and reinforce respect for and obedience and loyalty to various national symbols.”

Sports would later be incorporated as a key part of the Kuomintang propaganda, with the staging of various sporting competitions named after the president, as well as newly built ‘Chung Cheng’ (中正) sports and recreational centers.