Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

The end of 2017 and the first weeks of the new year saw several notable developments involving cross-strait relations. In late December and early January, in an alarming new practice, People’s Liberation Army bombers several times conducted reconnaissance flights that circumnavigated Taiwan. On Jan. 4, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) also unilaterally announced a new northbound flight path for its civilian aircraft (the M503 route) along the middle of the Taiwan Strait that violated a longstanding practice to keep such aircraft away from the centerline of this sensitive body of water.

The nationality of several Taiwanese authors has been listed as Chinese in the Chinese Name Authority Joint Database Search System, a collaborative project between libraries from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to standardize the names of people, groups, meetings and other bodies.

Different Chinese-language authors often share a name and the use of pen names is common, so the National Library of China, the Administrative Center of China’s Academic Library & Information System and other agencies in 2003 established the Cooperative Committee for Chinese Name Authority to settle the confusion and create a standard format for cataloging.