TAIPEI (Reuters) – Taiwan on Monday unveiled a newly redesigned passport giving more prominence to the island’s daily name, with the aim of avoiding confusion with China amid the COVID-19 pandemic and Beijing’s growing efforts to enforce sovereignty.
Existing Taiwanese passports have ‘Republic of China’, the formal name, written at the top in large English font, with ‘Taiwan’ at the bottom, which according to the government creates international confusion.
During the early days of the pandemic, Taiwan says some of the citizens were confused with Chinese citizens and sometimes unfairly subjected to the same COVID-19 banned entry ban when the disease was well under control in Taiwan but not in China. The new passport enlarges the word “Taiwan” in English and removes “Republic of China”, although the name remains in Chinese and in small English font around the national emblem.
The director general of the Bureau of Consular Affairs, Phoebe Yeh, told Reuters that they received more than 700 applications for the new passport this Monday afternoon, compared to a daily average of 1,000.
“The goal is to increase the visibility of Taiwan so that our people can not be misidentified if they come from China when traveling abroad,” she said.
Chen Li-ting, one of the first to apply for the new passport, said the change was ‘fantastic’.
“I thought it would happen sooner or later. That is, sooner or later the word Taiwan will appear more and more. And in the future, Republic of China might disappear,” he said.
China, referring to the new passports, said it did not matter what “small movements” Taiwan made, but that it would not change the fact that Taiwan was an inseparable part of China. China claims democratic Taiwan as its sovereign territory, and only says it has the right to speak internationally for the island, a position it strongly pushed for during the pandemic, especially at the World Health Organization (WHO).
(Edited by Yimou Lee and Ann Wang; Written by Ben Blanchard; Edited by Jacqueline Wong)