When “Taiwan” Was Erased from the World Coffee Championships
Written by AD Cafe from Taiwan
What Happened
On April 28, 2025, without any prior notice, the World Coffee Championships (WCC) quietly updated its official website — replacing every instance of Taiwan with Chinese Taipei.
For those unfamiliar with the WCC: it is the most prestigious competition body in the global specialty coffee industry, often described as the Olympics of coffee. Organized across multiple disciplines — from barista skills to latte art and brewers cup — the WCC selects regional representatives and crowns world champions each year.
The timing made the change feel even more abrupt.
Just two weeks earlier, on April 12, the Taiwanese coffee community had been celebrating one of its proudest moments: Bala Lin Shao-Hsing winning the World Latte Art Championship — Taiwan’s seventh world title in WCC history.
That joy was short-lived.
The Scope of the Change
Once we began looking into it, the full extent of the update became clear. This wasn’t just a minor label change going forward — it was a comprehensive, retroactive rewrite of history:
- Taiwan’s national coffee association is now listed as Chinese Taipei
- Historical competition results and participation records have been removed from the WCC website
- Award ceremony photos showing the word “Taiwan” have been cropped
There’s something particularly unsettling about how easy it is to erase a name in the digital age. A find-and-replace function. A few seconds. And nineteen years of a community’s presence — gone from the record.
A Personal Note
I was in Milan last year, attending the WCC with the Taiwan competing team, Coffee Underwater. I spent hours browsing the official website, and the name “Taiwan” was everywhere — in the list of competition bodies, in past rankings of each competition, in press releases. I didn’t think much of it at the time. It just felt like something that had always been there, and always would be.
Going back to those same pages this week, everything looks different.
That experience sits with me — the contrast between how natural it once felt to see your name somewhere, and how jarring it is when it disappears.
What We Decided to Do
The internet has never been a reliable archive. Once a name is removed from an official website, the trail goes cold for anyone who wasn’t already paying attention.
So we did what we could: we started building our own record. It’s not perfect, and we’re still working on turning it into a proper webpage, but it’s a start.
A note of genuine appreciation to the Canadian coffee championships, who have maintained detailed historical records for every WCC cycle: canadacoffeechampionships.com
The Record Taiwan Built — in Its Own Name
Before we talk about what comes next, it’s worth pausing to acknowledge what the Taiwanese coffee community has accomplished under its own name:
| Years of participation | 2007–2026 (19 years) |
| Competitors represented | 48 athletes |
| Total competition entries | 70 |
| Finalists | 18 |
| World Champions | 7 (across 5 disciplines) |
| Runner-ups & 3rd place | 3 silver, 2 bronze |
These aren’t just numbers. They represent nearly two decades of a community showing up, competing at the highest level, and building something to be proud of — under the name Taiwan.
Why This Extends Far Beyond the Competition Stage
The implications of this name change reach beyond competition results. They touch one of the most foundational values in specialty coffee: traceability.
COE Taiwan — Cup of Excellence is one of the most respected green coffee auction platforms in the world, providing international buyers access to exceptional single-origin coffees from Taiwan’s growing regions. If Taiwanese-grown coffee is forced to relabel its origin in international competition contexts, it doesn’t just harm producers — it undermines the integrity of the entire specialty coffee supply chain narrative.
In WCC competitions, competitors are expected to tell the story of their coffee’s origin. That sense of place — where it was grown, by whom, under what conditions — is central to how specialty coffee communicates value to the world. It is deeply ironic that the same organization hosting these competitions would, in the same press release, obscure the name of the community that produced those very coffees.
On the WCC’s Official Justification
Following pushback from the Taiwanese coffee community — including a public challenge from World Barista Champion Berg Wu (吳則霖) — WCC released an official statement on May 1, citing alignment with the frameworks used by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and FIFA.
That comparison deserves scrutiny.
The WCC’s Competition Body (CB) structure — the framework under which Taiwan Coffee Association holds its affiliation — is defined by the WCC itself as community-based. It is, in essence, a competition hosting license, not a membership tied to political recognition.
WCC Licensed Competition Bodies
A Competition Body* (CB) is a licensed entity who has been granted a license to organize Championships for their community in accordance with the World Coffee Championships Rules & Regulations. One of the benefits of a CB is that they can send their Champion to participate in the World Coffee Championships, and represent their community on a global stage.
This is meaningfully different from the IOC or FIFA membership models, which are directly linked to state sovereignty and political recognition criteria that have their own complicated histories.
The point is not to make a political argument. It is to ask a straightforward question: by what measure is Taiwan not already a recognized, active participant in the international community?
Taiwan is not a peripheral actor on the world stage — and it is certainly not peripheral in coffee. Consider a few facts:
- Your iPhone almost certainly runs on a Taiwanese chip. TSMC — headquartered in Hsinchu, Taiwan — manufactures over 90% of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. The global tech industry does not function without Taiwan.
- Taiwan’s passport opens 192 countries — visa-free, on arrival, or by e-visa. Fewer than 20 countries in the world require Taiwanese travelers to apply for a traditional visa. That is a more open travel document than most people realize.
- By GDP per capita, Taiwan ranks 14th in the world — ahead of Germany, Canada, and Australia. It is one of the wealthiest economies on the planet, by any standard measure.
- Taiwan ranks 12th globally on the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index — and 1st in Asia. It holds regular free elections, has a free press, and has been governed by peaceful transfers of power for decades.
- Taiwan is one of the densest coffee cultures in the world — including Taipei’s 3.4 cafés per square kilometer.
- Taiwan has produced some of the most decorated specialty coffee professionals on the planet. Simple Kaffa in Taipei was twice named the world’s best coffee shop by Big 7 Travel.
By almost every measure — economic, democratic, diplomatic, and certainly in coffee — Taiwan is already fully present in the international community.
If the WCC’s Competition Body framework is truly community-based, then the name used to represent that community should reflect how the community knows itself. New Zealand, for example, officially uses the dual name Aotearoa / New Zealand to honor Māori cultural identity — a recognition that names carry meaning beyond political formality. Taiwan’s coffee community deserves the same respect.
Taiwan’s coffee community has never called itself anything other than Taiwan. It has earned the right to keep that name on the world stage — not as a political statement, but as a simple matter of accuracy.
Keep Saying Taiwan with Us
The name has been changed.
But this is also a conversation happening in real time, across coffee communities around the world — and that’s where the leverage is.
You don’t have to be Taiwanese to be part of this. If you’re a competitor, a judge, a café owner, a roaster, or simply someone who believes that coffee communities deserve to be called by their own names — your voice carries weight here.
A few things that can make a difference:
- Keep saying Taiwan. When you write about Taiwan’s WCC competitors and champions, use the name Taiwan. The official record may say otherwise, but the community record doesn’t have to.
- Write to the WCC. One message is easy to ignore. A sustained volume of feedback from the international community is harder to dismiss. → Send your message here
- Share this. The more people outside Taiwan understand what happened — and why it matters to specialty coffee as a whole — the harder it becomes to treat this as a quietly administrative decision.
A Note on Who We Are
We are AD Cafe — Most influential Taiwan coffee media brand️.
