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Taiwan's status left unresolved by treaties

Expectations that the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and the 1952 Treaty of Taipei may be incorporated into high-school textbooks -- alongside the Cairo and Potsdam declarations -- have sparked a debate on the claim that Taiwan's status remains unsettled. I would like to give some background on this theory.

On Feb. 14, 1950, China and the Soviet Union signed a "Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance," which proved that Beijing was leaning toward the Soviets. On June 25 that year, North Korea invaded South Korea. In succession, the US and China entered the war. The military clash between the US and China on the Korean Peninsula made the US understand Taiwan's strategic value in containing the expansion of Chinese and Soviet communists in East Asia.

Then US president Harry Truman announced that the US Seventh Fleet would prevent any attack on Taiwan. To legalize such an action and to avoid criticism of interference in China's internal affairs, Truman stated that Taiwan's future status would not be determined until peace was restored in the Pacific region, a peace treaty was signed with Japan and the matter was reviewed by the UN. This was the origin of the theory that Taiwan's status remains unsettled.

As for the question of where Taiwan's sovereignty belongs, Article 2 (b) of the San Francisco Peace Treaty and Article 2 of the Treaty of Taipei only stated that Japan renounced all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores. There was no mention whatsoever of these areas being returned to China. Then Japanese prime minister Shigeru Yoshida also said that Japan merely renounced its territorial rights over Taiwan and that the sovereignty issue remained undecided.

On Sept. 29, 1972, then Jap-anese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka and then Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) signed a joint communique and established full-diplomatic relations. Japan recog-nized that the government of the PRC was the sole legal government of China. More interestingly, in the communique, Japan did not entirely accept Beijing's stance on the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty, which was something China was most concerned about.

The Chinese demanded during the negotiations that Japan recognize Taiwan as PRC territory. However, in the communique establishing diplomatic ties, Japan only used ambiguous language, using the words "understand and respect" instead of "recognize."

Japan said that because it had renounced sovereignty rights over Taiwan, the Pescadores and other affiliated islands in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, it no longer had any legal ground on which to "recognize" that the sovereignty of areas that were no longer its territory belonged to the PRC. Based on this principle of international law, territorial rights can only be determined by the countries involved. They cannot be recognized or determined by any irrelevant third country.

The day after China and Japan established diplomatic ties, the Japanese government said -- in a statement by then foreign minister Masayoshi Ohira at the Liberal Democratic Party's bicameral congressional meeting -- that Japan understood and respected Beijing's claim that Taiwan was an inseparable part of the PRC, but had not taken any stance recognizing such claim. Japan made it clear that the two countries' positions on the issue could never be unanimous.

At best, Japan could only equivocate politically and handle the issue with words like "understand and respect." At the same time, it also left room for maneuver in the development of Taiwan-Japan relations after the severing of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Ho Szu-shen is an associate professor in the department of Japanese at Fu Jen Catholic University.

Translated by Francis Huang
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