Chinese Taipei first appeared in the 1984 Winter Olympics as a forced rebrand for this, the Republic of China, or as I'll call it in this video, Taiwan.

Here's the real Taiwanese flag, and here is what you get at the Olympics.

This flag is only waived for sports.

How did this happen?

Why is Taiwan, Chinese Taipei, in the Olympics?

The Chinese from Taipei were so determined to stay in the games that they wanted to participate in everything.

This story doesn't just track UN votes and the history of China and Taiwan.

This is way more complicated than what China wants.

It's about an island that has competed under six different names at the Olympics in under a century.

It's about what sports means on the world stage and poisoned orange juice, yes, you heard me right.

And it will make you think, maybe for the first time, about what's in a name.

I need friends.

Before you get to Chinese Taipei rolling up on the Seine, it all starts with the Taiwanese athlete or as they once competed, Japan.

I wanted to get in touch with you because of these papers that you've written.

They're like oddly vivid, actually, and oddly like exciting storytelling about these sports traumas that have occurred.

But you have this expertise in this very niche area of of China and also Taiwan in sports.

And I was just curious, how did you get into that?

When I lived in Taiwan for the first time in 1991, I first started at Donghai University, which is kind of on the outskirts of Taichung in central Taiwan, really beautiful campus, moved downtown to be closer to the language school.

And I ended up, by coincidence, living a couple blocks from the baseball stadium, not knowing anything about the Japanese history of bringing baseball to Taiwan.

And obviously got to know that more closely, basic interest in sports, and then just kind of bumping into these instances that just by themselves, like, they just pop open with such interesting historical facts and surprises and stuff.

For a period of 50 years, from 1895 until the end of World War II, Taiwan was a colony of Japan.

This map is from 1894, it features China, Japan, and Formosa, what we'd call Taiwan now.

Formosa is kind of foreshadowing, by the way, but it is a part of Taiwanese history.

It's from the Portuguese Ilha Formosa, for beautiful island.

In 1895, with a brief intervening independent rule, it went from China to Japan.

You can see it at the edge of this 1933 map of the Japanese Empire.

And in the Olympics, Taiwanese athletes competed as Japanese, even taking Japanese names like

Seiken Cho.

In Taiwan, you got to choose if you wanted to take a Japanese name.

But it was a way to show that you were all in.

That same logic drives Taiwanese who volunteered to fight in World War II for Japan.

They don't know that Japan is going to have to give back Taiwan in 1945.

To them, we're Japanese.

Notice the flag on his shirt.

It's Japan's.

At the same time, China wasn't the People's Republic of China.

They were the Republic of China from 1912 to 1949, and they took tentative steps onto the Olympic stage.

In 1932, the Republic of China, it's just a guy.

Their Olympic team is a guy and his coach, right?

I mean, that's...

Obviously, they were hoping to be able to send more of a team than that, but this is the time of national crisis and the Japanese had just invaded.

And so it made it much more difficult for them to get a team together.

If things had been better, they would have sent a full team like they did in 1936.

There was a brief pause in the Olympic Games after that because of the guy on page seven of the Berlin Olympics report.

But then suddenly you had a new name on the name tag.

Japan had to give up Taiwan after World War II, and it was listed officially as China in the Olympics.

You can see China here in the opening ceremony, and they were listed as China with this Republic of China flag.

But it is in 1949 that a new era truly began.

Since 1949, this narrow body of water has been both a symbolic and a realistic moat, separating the Taiwan island complex from the coast of the communist held mainland of

China.

The communist takeover of China turned the mainland into the People's Republic of China and Taiwan into the Republic of China because of all the people who fled there.

That makes this the new name for Taiwanese athletes.

It is hard to overestimate the next 30 years of chaos and drama.

This was the peak.

Now Taiwan was the Republic of China, the country's official name even today.

The USSR, making its Olympic debut, dragged the PRC into the next Olympics.

The 1952 Olympic Games are on.

This led to immediate conflict.

The PRC went in the Olympics at the last minute, and the Republic of China boycotted in protest.

Remember, they both believed that they were the real China.

And so this Olympics naming controversy became a Cold War sideshow.

The next Olympic year, 1956, you began a long period in which Taiwan, the Republic of China, was the sole representative at the Olympics.

The games are beginning.

They competed that year, and in 1960, they had an epic Olympics thanks to indigenous

Taiwanese athlete CK Yang and American Rafer Johnson.

The duo had been teammates at UCLA.

They crumpled into each other at those 1960 Olympics, and Johnson won gold while Yang pulled silver.

Seriously, this should be a movie.

The best recounting of it is in Andrew Morse's paper, which I have linked on Patreon.

And every time I put out a video, I also put out a free newsletter with a little article.

And so that's what I've dedicated the article this time to, all about this friendship between

Johnson and Yang, and also the coach that was kind of the glue for them to get together and compete so well at UCLA and at the Olympics.

So if you want to see that, go there, sign up.

It is totally free.

You'll be able to read Andrew Morse's article at the link, and you can also read my pitch for what should totally be a movie.

CK Yang being an indigenous Taiwanese who's born during the Japanese period in this kind of far off, you know, eastern part of Taiwan.

The fact that in 1960 and 64, he's held up as the symbol of the Chinese nation was just fascinating.

But notice Yang's flag and TWN on the scoreboard, Republic of China flag, Taiwan abbreviation.

Yet they were formally called Formosa that year.

They used this name under protest, and it was an indicator of the tension over naming that still existed.

Trying to, again, thread that needle of make a protest, but not, not get in trouble and not danger CK Yang's chances.

By 1964, they became Taiwan at the Olympics, a name that they actually kind of didn't like.

You can imagine a very different history if they had accepted Taiwan.

They'd be in the United Nations if they could have accepted Taiwan.

Their history would be very different.

But it's only 15 years since that regime had to relocate from China to Taiwan.

And there were a lot of people that were really hoping they could get back there, that the ROC could defeat the communists.

So the government couldn't just say, forget it, we're here now, we're not going back.

I mean, they had to keep talking about going back.

Reconquest talk only really goes away in the very late 80s.

This feud also rippled onto the field.

CK Yang was a Sports Illustrated cover model as the world's best athlete, and he was a favorite to win the decathlon in 1964.

It was later revealed that his teammates were PRC spies who secretly poisoned his orange juice so that he wouldn't perform so well.

He got the news 30 years later, and he'd never been quite sure what had happened and why he was just so out of sorts that day.

Rayford Johnson wrote about it.

I'm inclined to believe that narrative.

After I published an article about him, I was contacted by a family member who said that they didn't think that he had been drugged.

They thought that the narrative of him being drugged was one further political twist, that the government had had to make up the story of him being drugged in order to explain him not winning the gold medal and winning glory in 1964.

Still, by the 1970s, they earned back that Republic of China name, and the PRC was still out.

So the question you should have now is, how does the Republic of China get turned into

Chinese Taipei over the next 10 years?

The meeting between the leaders of China and the United States is to seek the normalization of relations between the two countries.

I am showing you Nixon in China because everybody recognizes that, but it is also just a symbol of a broader point, which is that the PRC had a big coming out party in the 1970s.

They were ready to vault under the world stage in a bunch of ways, including at the Olympics.

The UN essentially booted the Republic of China in favor of the PRC, and the United

States normalized relations with the PRC while basically agreeing to kind of smile and nod at Taiwan without explicitly recognizing it.

China was getting closer to Olympic acceptance.

To get in, you had to join sports federations, and China did that one by one, kind of like assembling an army.

And in 1975, China did it.

But the Chinese wanted Taiwan completely excluded from the Olympics.

In 1976, the IOC was going to let Taiwan compete as a Republic of China, but Canada actually got in the way and said that they had to follow the PRC's rules.

Taiwan refused.

And Trudeau has this great line where he says, we love the Taiwanese, we just don't call them Chinese.

Taiwan boycotted Lake Placid, and both nations boycotted Moscow in 1980.

By 1984, Taiwan had less leverage and capitulated to the best option that they had.

Not Republic of China, not Taiwan, but a new, very bizarre name.

Chinese Taipei.

The Chinese Taipei era is what has continued through to today.

And it's weird.

One of the other problems with Chinese Taipei, besides it being absurd on the face of it, the Chinese name can also be played with.

What in Taiwan they call Zhonghua Taipei, which is about the cultural Chineseness.

In China, they take another meaning of the English word Chinese and call it Zhongguo

Taipei, which means China the nation, Taipei that belongs to China the nation.

That's kind of like the beauty of Chinese Taipei in a certain way, if such an absurd thing can be called beautiful, is that it incorporates both imaginations of that.

You can imagine it's just the cultural Chineseness of most of Taiwan.

Or if you're on the PRC side, you can say, see, it's proof.

A couple of years ago, they had to agree to promise Chinese Taipei to carry only their national Olympic flag, not their national flag.

China is now recognized to be the People's Republic of China.

Taiwan has occasionally rebelled against the mandatory name and flag.

We have a slight delay, a little bit of garbage on the track here at Canada Olympic Park.

In 1988, bobsledders were sternly warned for this.

Do you see their flag on the helmet?

The Republic of China, Taiwan flag on their helmet instead of the Chinese Taipei one.

This was breaking a big taboo and they got in a lot of trouble for it.

Protesters doing the same kind of thing with the flag have been arrested even in the United

States.

But in 2018, this came to a head with a referendum that Taiwanese voters rejected.

They decided it was better to be Chinese Taipei than not to compete at all.

So let me tell you why I made this video.

It is obviously really interesting to track the history of China and Taiwan through their

Olympics appearances, and there's a lot there.

But I actually made it because my last video was about the 1980 boycott in Moscow.

And I came down pretty clearly on one side, I thought the boycott was a bad idea.

But then I did a poll on YouTube and Spotify and it became clear that to a lot of you, the situation was more complicated than that.

But when it comes to Chinese Taipei, the choice is like super crystal clear.

Here you have national identity.

What is more important to that?

Is it getting to compete in the Olympics or is it the name that you get to use?

Which one of these matters to you?

Do you play with the name tag that's given to you?

Or do you sit out until you can choose what's written on it?

Taiwan, Chinese Taipei thing, should they compete?

Should they boycott?

My real opinion is I respect the voters of Taiwan.

They voted on this in a referendum.

That's their vote.

It's their country.

I don't know anything about it.

However, I will give you my second real opinion, which is that if you ignore the first one,

I think they should sit it out.

I think they should boycott.

I mean, what is the point of representing your country if you can't represent your country?

It's wrong.

That's what I think.

I want to hear what you think, though.

I want to hear your discussion of this.

Thank you for being here.

As I mentioned, I have all the sources linked down below and reaction video and other stuff up on Patreon, as well as that free article.

And I hope to see you in the next one.

All right.

Bye.

Oh, wow.

I said this was a cookie.

This is not like a cookie.

Oh, yeah.

Elephant ear, baby.

Yeah.

Do you want any?