Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

How important are names? Well, that depends.

The old question of Taiwan’s name resurfaced again when Chen Zhen (陳蓁), a Chinese adjunct (part time) professor at the Polytechnic University of Milan, recently bullied a Taiwanese student into changing the name of his country of origin on his thesis.

Chen pressured him to change it from “Taipei, Taiwan,” to “Taipei, China.”

So, how important are names, especially the accuracy of one’s country of origin on an academic thesis?

More than a month into the war, Ukrainian forces are fighting tenaciously under the leadership of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, while Russian forces have been suffering remarkable, unforeseen casualties and losses.

Since the beginning, the war has gone awry for Russia, the second-biggest military power in the world, and its indiscriminate attacks on civilians and other atrocities have been met with censure and condemnation.

So far, Taiwanese are waiting to see what the government can learn from this war, described as the most significant in Europe since 1945.