I have dual citizenship (Taiwan and USA), and I currently study in a American high school located in Taiwan. I've already participated in the regional contest about a month ago and did pretty well, so I qualified for the national contest.

So now I'm practicing as much as I can for the national contest, but recently I was told that I could qualify for the training camp but not the national team for Taiwan.

I searched online for IOI rules and found this link on the IOI-2017 site: http://www.ioinformatics.org/rules/reg17.pdf. Here are some parts of it that stood out:

"A Contestant is a student who was enrolled in a school at a level not higher than secondary education, in the Country they are representing, for the majority of the period 1 September to 31 December in the year before IOI’n. Students who are studying abroad may represent the Country of their nationality."

Not am I only studying in Taiwan, I also have Taiwan citizenship, so I definitely fit this criteria.

"The main objectives to be accomplished by the IOI are: • To discover, encourage, bring together, challenge, and give recognition to young people who are exceptionally talented in the field of informatics; • To foster friendly international relationships among computer scientists and informatics educators; • To bring the discipline of informatics to the attention of young people; • To promote the organisation of informatics competitions for students at schools for secondary education; • To encourage countries to organise a future IOI in their country."

Later, I asked for clarification about why I was ineligible, which doesn't support the objectives above:

"The national teams are supposed to show that Taiwanese education is superior to other education systems. If a student from a foreign school represents Taiwan in an international olympiad, then it defeats the purpose. Thus, you are ineligible to represent Taiwan in international olympiads."

1. Other countries, like USA, don't care about things like the statement above.
2. The statement above only applies if the contestants perform well. Else, they should invite someone "with a different education system" (I don't know why it matters) to take the blame for not performing well.
3. Which person at IOI would notice which school I came from?
4. Which person at IOI who even noticed which school I came from would bother to know that my school provides American education?
5. Which person at IOI who even noticed which school I came from and that my school provides American education would change their views about Taiwan?
6. Why can't they credit my results (IF they are even good) to the training that I received in the training camp in Taiwan?
7. Of course "Taiwanese education" and "American education" prepares all students for international olympiads (for example for informatics, by teaching topics like Dynamic Programming Optimizations or Heavy-Light Decomposition in school), and it's not the contestants' own hard work. Thus, the results for each country accurately reflects how successful the education system in that country is.

I don't really have that much experience or knowledge in everything mentioned above. Maybe IOI set a "loose bound" for the eligible contestants, and each country can set its own "tighter bound", so I came here to ask, what are your thoughts?