I confess to being fairly neutral on the issue of "Taiwanizing" names of state-owned enterprises here, so I was somewhat bemused to read the China Post's vehement opposition last Sunday:
It seems as if the government of President Chen Shui-bian will never cease to change names and symbols perceived to connect Taiwan with the Chinese nation.
According to reports made public over the past few days, the Cabinet has begun preparations to change the names of several major corporations and institutions that are majority-owned by the state.
These reports say that China Airlines, an international carrier that has operated for some 47 years, will have to change its name to "Taiwan Airlines" or perhaps "Formosa Airlines."
...[in doing so] , a major brand name that has been carefully built up for nearly half a century would be dismantled virtually overnight to satisfy the political correctness of the current lame-duck administration.
I don't want to be mean here, but you might want to google "China Airlines"+"safety record" to give you some idea about how "carefully" the brand name was built up over the last fifty years. Maybe renaming the company is an act of mercy which might help distance it from its formerly dismal reputation in this arena.
(I say "formerly" for a reason. The paper neglects to inform its readers that it was under the Chen administration that China Airlines began to improve upon passenger safety.)
Taiwan's China Post mentions a few other name-change candidates as well:
There is also the matter of Chunghwa Telecom, whose name sounds innocuous enough in English, but which translates as "China Telecom".
[...]
There is also...China Steel, as well as Chunghwa Post, the national postal service whose name in Chinese literally means "Chinese Postal Administration."
The paper breezily dismisses the argument that the name changes will avoid confusion, claiming, "these institutions have been working fine for many decades." And for companies that serve local consumers, that's probably true - for now. No one walks into the local post office and thinks that it's owned by the Communist Party of China. On the other hand, KMT Chairman Ma Ying-jeou has promised to allow Chinese firms to operate in Taiwan if he's elected president in 2008, and if that happens, then local consumers might very well wish to have some way to distinguish between Taiwanese companies that bear the "China" moniker and their Chinese equivalents.
The case is even stronger for companies which serve foreign customers. Surely, not many foreigners can be expected to know that China Airlines is Taiwanese, while Air China is Chinese. There's a good business reason why Pepsi is Pepsi, and not "Cola-Coca".
It's called product differentiation.
The claim that such changes remove Taiwan from the Chinese fatherland becomes surreal when one considers that the Taiwanese government has also suggested dropping the Republic of China calendar in favor of the Christian calendar. As a fellow blogger previously observed, how would Taiwan's adoption of the calendar that Communist China itself uses move Taiwan any further from China?
(I wrote more on this in a post back in February. Scroll down to the March 1st update.)
The China Post objects to these name changes on cost grounds, and I'm not in any position to argue with any of its figures at this time. I do however, doubt that "Formosa Airlines" will have to renegotiate quite as many air service agreements as the Post asserts it will, and I also doubt that the China Post was quite so worried about cost when it was time to change Japanese-era names to Chinese ones.
I understand full well why the KMT said "hang the cost" and renamed things in Taiwan 50 years ago. They were Chinese nationalists, and they they did it because it appealed to their base. And President Chen? Well, he's a Taiwanese nationalist. It shouldn't be surprising that he, too, is trying to appeal to HIS base.
Any talk of a "Cultural Revolution" is absurd. The China Post is free to argue against these changes, and none of its owners or writers will EVER be sent to a re-education camp. Moreover, redress is merely A SINGLE democratic election away. If the KMT objects strongly enough to President Chen's policies, it can always reverse them.
IF it wins the presidency, that is.
The paper closes by bitterly suggesting that President Chen should "direct his subordinates to stop wasting time and money changing names and symbols, and start thinking about how to properly govern the country instead." Here, the Post utterly confuses Chen's priorities. Chen DID try to "properly govern" the country, only to witness the KMT block most of his legislation. Having dammed the political water from flowing in productive directions, did the KMT really not anticipate it overflowing the banks and running in non-productive directions instead?
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UPDATE: Written Wednesday, this post was left unpublished until I could check it for grammar and sentence flow. By Friday, the China Post revealed a name change it DOES support:
Thus, to facilitate its rule of Taiwan if it regains power with Ma [Ying-jeou] assuming the [Taiwanese] presidency in 2008, the KMT should lose no time...[in addressing] the issue of "indigenous consciousness"...[It should consider] changing the KMT of China into the KMT of Taiwan, or at least eliminating the word "China" since, in the present political climate, such a name may mislead people into believing it is a party of the People's Republic of China (PRC), or an organization closely related to the PRC, thus incurring the charge of national betrayal. [Emphasis added]
Sounds like a Cultural Revolution in the making here. Why, the KMT got along just fine for the last 100 years with its present name! And what of the STAGGERING costs of ordering new letterhead and namecards...
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