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= Title: The controversy between Taiwan and China on LSE sculpture "The World Upside Down" =

= The Sculpture = The World Upside Down is a sculpture crafted by the Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Wallinger and on the campus of the London School of Economics (LSE), outside LSE’s student activity centre.

= The controversy= [img] Originally, Taiwan was illustrated as a country on the map in pink, which is different from China in yellow, and a red dot marked as the country's capital, Taipei. After a protest of a group of Chinese students, LSE called a meeting and decided to request the artist to change the colour of Taiwan as if it was a part of China and change the mark of Taipei to a city instead of the capital of a country.

As the decision was made, a London-based NGO, Formosa Salon, initiated an online petition against the decision and appealed LSE to recognise the fact that Taiwan and China are two independent countries and to maintain the current status of the sculpture.

The petition was claimed to have gathered more than 1,600 signature in the first 16 hours and more than 10,000 signatures before the petition was closed. It was reported in a Taiwanese newspaper that the number of signatures has reached 7,000 roughly one day before the proposed petition closure time.

The petition was followed by an official open letter from the Minister of Foreign Affairs Taiwan, Joseph Wu, to the Director of LSE, Dame Minouche Shafik. The open letter emphasised a few key facts that the LSE should consider: "...Taiwan is a sovereign democratic country, not part of any other....The British government refers to Taiwan, and conducts relations with Taiwan, as “Taiwan,” period. On behalf of Taiwan, I thus urge you and your institution not to change the depiction of Taiwan on the sculpture."

The President of Taiwan, Dr Tsai Ing-wen, who is an graduate alumnus of LSE, also commented:       "We are a sovereign independent country. We won't disappear on the surface of the earth."

Nigel Evans MP and Lord Rogan, the Co-Chairs of the British-Taiwanese All-Party Parliamentary Group in the House of Commons, also wrote a letter to the Director of LSE, addressing that: "Depicting Taiwan as part of China is inaccurate and misleading as Taiwan has never been a part of the People's Republic of China. It is also contrary to the UK government's longstanding policy to refer to Taiwan as simply 'Taiwan', as Mark Field, Minister of State for Asia and the Pacific at the Foreign Commonwealth Office, publicly stated on 10 July 2018....As a model institution of higher education in the UK that prizes academic freedom and freedom of speech, LSE should not succumb to this pressure as doing so would undermine these democratic principles and would constitute political interference in the academic sphere."

Several post-it notes were stuck to the sculpture in response to a wave of voluntary actions.