DPP must turn over new leaf

"Columbus discovered new China." However absurd that statement might sound, it actually appeared in a book titled The History of Spicy Food in China, republished by the Taiwan-based Rye Field Publishing Co. After its author and mainland-based scholar Cao Yu complained on social media, the publishing house apologized for the goof-up and promised to withdraw all the books from bookstores.

The Taiwan-based publishing house did not say how the mistake crept in, but that is easy to guess. At the root of the problem is not the publishing house itself, but Tsai Ingwen and her Democratic Progressive Party. Ever since she took office in 2016, the Tsai administration has balked at anything that reminds people of the fact that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. To placate a difficult administration, publishers are thus forced to delete or replace such references in books.

The sentence that the publishers found offending in the aforementioned book was "Columbus discovered the new continent", because in Chinese the word "continent" reads the same as "mainland". So they replaced every reference to "mainland" in the book with "China". Thus was born a "new China".

The censorship pressure from the Tsai administration is compelling publishing houses such as Rye Field to do self-censorship. To quote Alfred W. Lin, a young Kuomintang leader, Tsai and her DPP have created a mini "garrison headquarters", or mini censorship agency, in the heart of every person associated with culture.

At the just-concluded Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, officials from the island blamed speed skater Huang Yu-ting for having posted a video of herself training wearing a sport suit with "China" emblazoned on it. Taiwan's executive head Su Tseng-chang has ordered a probe against her.
Clearly, the DPP has got its priorities wrong and is doing nothing to correct them.