Gangsters, collect 'em while they're hot!

Taichung AmCham alerted me to this tale of gangsters raiding the local post office (here and here). Earlier this week at the Fengyuan Post Office here in the Kingdom of Chung, people started lining up as early as 3 AM according to media reports to purchase the Year of the Snake stamp sets. However, just as the Post Office was about to open to eager collectors, a group of 70 lads clad identically in black pushed their way to the head of the line and started threatening postal workers and intimidating innocent stamp collectors. Women with children were almost knocked down, according to our intrepid reporters, who managed to get wind of this event. Apparently last year's issue had rocketed from $1000 to $14,000 NT in just a year. Better than gambling and prostitution! Collectors said they didn't expect this year's stamps to do so well, however, so karma may have the last laugh. No word in the media whether our brave policemen had taken time out from their mah jong games to save the stamps and souls at the local post office.
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Taiwan Post Gone Again

Get'em while they're hot! They may well be the last stamps with "Taiwan" on them for a while, as the KMT has re-asserted its colonial identity over Taiwan:

The name of the state-run postal company was changed back to the original title Chunghwa Post, in a low-key ceremony in Taipei.

Former Directorate General of Posts director Hsu Chieh-kuei (許介圭) criticized former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration yesterday for its name-change policy, calling it nothing more than political maneuvering.

Last year President Chen changed the name of Chunghwa Post back to "Taiwan Post," the name it had been known under during the Japanese and early KMT colonial periods. This was part of a process of restoring the name "Taiwan" to organizations that had once had that name, and removing markers of KMT colonialism from names across the island. During transitions from colonial and authoritarian governments to local, democratic governance, such name changes are common.

The original political maneuvering was deleting "Taiwan" from such names in the first place, part of a political strategy to eliminate the idea of "Taiwan" from political discourse. The Postal Museum's online presentation (click on the pic) is an outpost of this colonialist historical pattern:

China's modern postal service was founded in 1896 and the General Post Office was set in Beijing. For a hundred years, the efforts made by each generation of postal workers have contributed to the growth of the postal enterprise. Especially, the contributions which all former General postmasters devoted cannot be left unrecognized.

People talk about Taiwan's contested identities, but the real problem is not that it is contested, but that, in so many public spaces, it is not contested at all.

[Taiwan]