Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport - Origin of The Name

Origin of The Name

The airport, originally planned as Taoyuan International Airport, bore the name of late President Chiang Kai-shek until 2006. In Chinese, its former name was literally "Chung-Cheng (Zhongzheng) International Airport", where Chung-Cheng is the legal given name which Chiang Kai-shek had used since the 1910s. In Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek is associated with the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang and its many years of one-party authoritarian rule. Local officials in Taoyuan County and members of the Pan-Green Coalition often referred to the hub by the name originally associated with it: "Taoyuan International Airport". News organizations and local residents sometimes combined the two commonly used names as "Taoyuan Chung-Cheng Airport."

The Executive Yuan of then-President Chen Shui-bian's administration officially approved the name Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport for the hub on September 6, 2006. The opposition Kuomintang, which together with its political allies held a one-vote majority in the Legislative Yuan, decried the change and proposed "Taiwan Taoyuan Chiang Kai-shek International Airport" instead. The disagreement, like those affecting the names of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and other Taiwan landmarks, stands as another manifestation of the trend known as Taiwan localization among pan-Green officials and desinicization by Pan-Blue Coalition. The media in mainland China has always referred to the airport as "Taoyuan International Airport" so as to avoid mentioning Chiang Kai-shek. Despite the name change, the airport is still known as Chiang Kai-Shek (CKS) International Airport in all official records of IATA.

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    Someone had literally run to earth
    In an old cellar hole in a byroad
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    Made shift to shelter them without the help
    Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)