Bitter aftertaste: Taiwan’s leading baristas forced to compete at global coffee championship as ‘Chinese Taipei’

Berg Wu remembers the pride he felt when he was crowned world barista champion. The stands that June day in Dublin were packed with cheering friends as he bested competitors from more than 50 countries to take first place at the 2016 World Coffee Championships (WCC).The first Taiwanese person to win the competition, he draped the red, blue and white nationalist flag of the Republic of China – Taiwan’s official name – over his shoulders as he posed for pictures with his award.But a decade on, that victory will now have an asterisk next to it in his mind. On Wednesday, the Taiwan Coffee Association announced it had been informed by WCC organisers that all Taiwanese participants were now required to compete under the name “Chinese Taipei” as a “basic and unavoidable condition for participating”.The move applies retroactively, Wu says, meaning his victory now represents an entity he does not recognise.“The whole process was extremely opaque. It just happened,” Wu tells the Guardian. “None of us competitors and no one in the wider coffee community had heard anything about this beforehand.”For decades Olympians from Taiwan – formally the Republic of China – have had to compete under the team name