Taiwan is not part of China, says Canadian MP Michael Cooper

Cooper raised Taiwan mislabelling issue by Canadian Institutes of Health Research, reported Taiwan News.

Cooper asked Minister of Health Jean-Yves Duclos on Friday during a House of Commons inquiry session why the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), responsible for funding health and medical research, mistakenly marked the nationality of Taiwanese grant applicants as "Taiwan, a province of China," the Liberty Times reported.

"Taiwan is not a province of China, Taiwan is Taiwan!" he said.

Cooper said he raised CIHR's mislabelling issue six months ago and questioned why the error was not fixed after all this time.

He asked Duclos why he failed to deal with such a blatant mislabelling of Taiwan, reported Taiwan News.

Cooper further said that he looked forward to cooperating with lawmakers on the mislabelling issue.

Cooper proposed the Canada-Taiwan Relations Framework Act in June to provide a legal framework for bolstering Canada-Taiwan relations.

Canada follows a "One China Policy," which acknowledges that there is only one Chinese government, does not recognise Taiwan as a sovereign state and does not maintain official government-to-government relations with Taipei.

This is different than Beijing's "One China Principle" that insists Taiwan is a part of China and will be reunified with the mainland one day under the Chinese Communist Party.

The dispute over independence between mainland China and Taiwan stems back to the Chinese Civil War, when in 1949 the armies of Mao Zedong forced then-leader Chiang Kai-shek and the remnants his government known as the Kuomintang to retreat to Taiwan, where they declared it the Republic of China (ROC). The mainland under Mao became the People's Republic of China (PRC), but that government was not internationally recognized until the '70s.

The ROC originally claimed to represent the entirety of China in 1949, held China's seat on the UN Security Council and at the time was recognized by many nations as the sole Chinese government in power.

However, in 1971 the UN awarded diplomatic recognition to Beijing, forcing the ROC government out.

Taiwan's status is a convoluted situation as it denies claims that it belongs to the PRC, has its own constitution, has been governed independently since 1949 and fiercely defends its current democratic status.

However, formal independence from the mainland has not been declared though Taiwan views itself as a sovereign state, despite its legal status being ambiguous. (ANI)