Please correct our country’s name from “Taiwan, Province of China” to “Taiwan” on Access Now’s website

An open letter to Access Now

Hi,

I’m Irvin, Mozilla contributor from Taiwan. I had contributing to internet Human Right policy advocacy for years and had joined last year’s RightsCon.

Recently I notice that Access Now wrongly list my country’s name as “Taiwan, Province of China” on the campaign page country drop-down list (eg., https://www.accessnow.org/campaign/free-ahmed-mansoor/). Please correct it and listing our country as “Taiwan” or “Taiwan (Republic of China)” (our formal name).

Please fix the Country drop-down list.

I believe you had wrongly followed ISO 3166-2, this name list wrongly put Taiwan under “province of China”, following UN’s POV, we all know how bias it can be.

Taiwan had never been a province of current China Communist government, although they always claimed as it, and force other country to acknowledge it as “One-China Policy”.

One-China policy - Wikipedia *The One-China policy is the policy or view that there is only one sovereign state called "China", despite the existence…*en.wikipedia.org

We are an independent island country, with 23M inhabitants. We had democracy government with elected presidents, no internet regulation, not behind the great firewall, and in no favor of totalitarianism.

We had strong civil society and diversity civil hacker communities such as g0v, famous civil hacker community. We even have legally gay marriage (start from 2019).

You can read the whole story in articles below. In short, we had been an independent political entity since 1949, when KMT party lose their civil war against Communist Party in China and retreat to this island.

  • http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-16164639
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-Strait_relations

Taiwan profile *Taiwan is an island which has for all practical purposes been independent since 1950, but which China regards as a rebel…*www.bbc.com

Political status of Taiwan - Wikipedia *The Political and legal status of Taiwan (or the Taiwan Issue as referred to by the Republic of China) hinges on whether…*en.wikipedia.org

Cross-Strait relations - Wikipedia *The English expression "cross-Strait relations" has been used by the two sides concerned and by many observers so that…*en.wikipedia.org

Some Best practice,

Mozilla — https://wiki.mozilla.org/Lists_of_Countries_and_Regions

Lists of Countries and Regions - MozillaWiki *If your product or website needs to display maps with country/region boundaries marked on, or translate the position of…*wiki.mozilla.org

FreeBSD — https://www.freebsd.org/internal/i18n.html

Internationalization Policy *We follow the guidelines used by IBM, Microsoft, Google, and other prominent software companies in their documentation…*www.freebsd.org

Please correct our name in Access Now’s country list, just simply list it as Taiwan.

Very thanks,

Irvin Chen Community Liaison, MozTW (Mozilla Taiwan Community)

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