De Facto Live on Dutch Public Radio
De Facto was hosted by the Dutch radio show Bureau Buitenland to tell about our passion for stamps, frictional states and curious borders.
On January 14th De Facto was invited to the VPRO radioshow Bureau Buitenland (The Foreign Desk), part of the national public radio. Floor & Jorie had a ten-minute long conversation with host Chris Kijne. You can listen to it here (in Dutch). A number of topics came up: borders in Kosovo, the sovereign free state of Eurostaete, the creation of the Kingdom of Lovely and this stamp above.
This stamp comes from Malawi and was published in 2012. Images of protest, aerial photographs of the islands and the map of China, with the location of the Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands and the other two claimants Taiwan and Japan are shown. The most striking of this stamp is that it concerns a Chinese claim: The Diaoyu Islands are Chinese territory. In 2008, the Malawian government cut off the 41-year-old relationship it had with Taiwan and recognized ‘that there is but one China in the world… and that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory’. In that same year China gave a $70 million grant to build the Karonga-Chitipa highway linking Malawi with neighboring Zambia and in 2011 Malawi received an $80 million loan from the Export Import Bank of China to construct a university for science and technology. This stamp can be seen as a favor back to the Chinese. It is all about geopolitics.