Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

During the Communist revolution in China, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) slogans was that “workers have no motherland.” Nowadays, capitalists advocate globalization based on the view that businesspeople have no motherland. Both are wrong, because both workers and businesspeople have a motherland. The only exceptions are the businesspeople of Taiwan: They exist in limbo, somewhere between having and not having a motherland.

Taiwanese businesspeople who have invested in China are affectionately called “compatriots” by Chinese officials, who welcome them back to “the motherland.” However, according to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Constitution they are not citizens of that motherland and so their treatment, for good or for bad, differs from that accorded to their “motherland compatriots.”

US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on Tuesday called on US President Barack Obama’s administration to immediately push for Taiwan to be awarded observer status in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Blaming China for working behind the scenes to keep Taiwan out of ICAO, she said: “The provincial and shortsighted manipulations of Beijing’s leaders who seek to deny Taiwan international space cannot stand in the way of airport safety and security.”