The Venice film festival has become the focus of the increasingly bitter row between Taiwan and China regarding the sovereignty of the Taiwanese state. Protests have been filed by Taiwan’s Government Information Office and Taiwanese production company ARS after big budget movie Seediq Bale was listed as originating from Taiwan AND China.
Seediq Bale produc r Jimmy Huang was quick to confirm that the movie is a “pure Taiwan-made film and not a film made by Taiwan and China.” The movie in question is Taiwan’s biggest budget production of all time costing around $24.3m and the subject matter, the 1930 Wushe Incident where the people rose up against the colonial Japanese forces, may have made the film makers particularly sensitive to the issue of Taiwanese Independence from China.
The issue of Taiwan’s independence is a very sensitive political issue. China’s communist government does regard the pacific island as part of their territory but Taiwan disputes this. The film festival has a history of listing Taiwanese productions as “Taiwan, China” as it did so in 2007 with Ang Lee’s Lust. It may be that the film organisers are wary of the political issue or it could also be that the inclusion of China in the film listing is because the movie’s executive producer John Woo is from Hong Kong.
Either way Taiwanese movie companies have long been sensitive to this issue. 2010 saw the cancellation of a Taipai week at the Shanghai film festival because film makers were opposed to their movies being listed as “Taiwan, China” instead of being from Taiwan
as a separate territory.
This fall, a special group of students will arrive at Taiwanese universities: Roughly 2,000 young men and women from 41 universities in the PRC. They will become the first from Mainland China to enroll in full degree programs in Taiwan in more than 60 years. This development seems to be another sign of the warming ties between the former rivals breaking down yet another barrier that have separated them in the past. After the Civil War, China and Taiwan split in 1949 though Beijing still considers the island part of its territory and has threatened to invade should Taiwan move toward formal independence. But ties improved dramatically when Beijing-friendly President Ma Ying-jeou came to power on a platform of boosting economic ties with China. Accordingly, the plan is a result of talks between the two governments last year with the goal of forging closer trade ties and promoting educational exchange between the two countries. 
The following words, spoken by Qiu Qiming on China’s state TV, provoked a storm of support on the Chinese blogosphere: “If nobody can be safe, do we want this speed? Can we live in apartments that do not fall down? Can the roads we drive on in our cities not collapse? Can we travel in safe trains? And if there is a major accident can we not be in a hurry to bury the trains? Can we afford the people a basic sense of security?”
During the Canadian Foreign Minister’s first trip to China between July 16 to 20, Canada didn’t discuss China’s human right record in public. Foreign Minister John Baird set aside that sensitive topic to close-door meetings with his Chinese counterpart, Mr. Yang Jiechi. Baird refused to discuss the closed-door meetings’ substance. It should be recalled that Mr. Yang is the Chinese official who denied Chinese police involvement in the downtown Beijing assaults of foreign journalists last Feb 27. The denials came despite video evidence and several witness testimonies to the opposite. 