President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is in full electioneering mode, focusing on the issue of national identity and saying in Chinese, “I am Taiwanese.”
One can imagine his soul shrieking as he uttered those words, but when he said it in English he chose not to use the word “Formosan” or the word that came into common usage in the 1960s, “Taiwanese.”
Instead he declared himself to be an “R.O.C.er,” an invented phrase that is neither here nor there, a play on Republic of China (ROC), which could also be pronounced like “rocker.”