On the international media's perspective
Inspired (rather indirectly) by recent posts by Bent, The Only Readhead in Taiwan, and Michael Turton, I've made a little chart that I think demonstrates the main reason the international media has such a warped view of the Taiwan situation -- because they still largely see it in terms of the civil war mentality that dominated the international debate and research for decades, as well as US policy. They never really saw things as Taiwan does, from the inside. Here's the chart -- click for enlargement:
I do this to point out there is something more besides "using the China angle" in stories or pro-China bias involved in this problem of Taiwan's portrayal in the international media. It's also a historical problem that essentially requires reeducation (not through forced labor!) to fix.
2 comments:
A-gu, I think this is one of the biggest problems when it comes to how Taiwan's initiatives are viewed from abroad.
At the recent conference on the UN Referendum, I asked Boris Voyer from IRI-Asia about this, how that one sentence about a "split" shows up in every article you read about Taiwan, and he said that, while there are currently projects underway to change this and to spread awareness, none of them are organized, none having a real clear objective.
It's a shame.
I agree. This is fundamentally a historic problem. You can't have two sides blasting rhetoric for 20 years about taking the other side over and expect everyone to just shift perspective once that ends.
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