Sunday was the eve of Taiwan Retrocession Day, the anniversary of the day in 1945 when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) claims the Japanese ceded Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC). It was also the day the head of the Chinese delegation to the Tokyo International Film Festival, Jiang Ping (江平), caused a diplomatic incident by insisting that the Taiwanese delegation use the name “Taiwan, China.”
The whole sorry affair has left President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with egg on his face. His “cross-strait diplomatic truce” bubble has burst. The Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) honeymoon is over. The mask has slipped, and Taiwanese have caught a glimpse of what lies beneath. No wonder pan-blue politicians have been more vocal in their criticism of Jiang’s words than members of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
It’s a classic case of the Emperor’s new clothes and has exposed how little weight the words Ma used in his Taiwan Retrocession Day address actually carried when he said Taiwan is already the Taiwan of the Taiwanese people, the Taiwan of the Republic of China. All that served to do was muddy the waters even further.
Ma mentioned the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Declaration and the official Japanese surrender, saying these provided the basis for the ceding of Taiwan to the ROC, and therefore the foundations of Taiwan Retrocession, and that they were binding. He added that then-US president Harry Truman said, back in 1950, that each country accepted that the ROC on Taiwan had sovereignty.
Retrocession Day was established by the KMT government and is an important part of the KMT’s claim that it has a legitimate right to rule Taiwan. The fact that Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) took over responsibility for the rule of Taiwan from Japan means that rule by the KMT (or the ROC) in Taiwan is both proper and legitimate. This is the first Taiwan.
The DPP has a different interpretation. In its view the KMT government in Taiwan was worse than the Japanese colonial government that preceded it, because of the 228 Incident and White Terror. For the DPP Taiwan Retrocession Day has negative and objectionable connotations. Moreover, although Japan did surrender in the China theater of war to the Allied Forces, the text of the Treaty of San Francisco merely stated that Japan relinquished sovereignty over Taiwan, but did not specify to which country. This is why many people consider the issue of Taiwan’s sovereignty to be unresolved, and why the DPP government from 2000 to 2008 referred to Taiwan Retrocession Day simply as the anniversary of the end of the war. In this context, Taiwan is an independent, sovereign country. That is the second Taiwan.
The KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) arrived at what is known as the “1992 consensus,” the idea that there is “one China, with each side having its own interpretation.” The KMT holds that the “one China” is the ROC in Taiwan and not the People’s Republic of China in China. Of course, Beijing disagrees, as Jiang’s insistence has shown. As far as this interpretation goes, Taiwan is merely a province of China, which is where they get “Taiwan, China” from — this is the third Taiwan.
It is hard to say whether there is really a consensus on “one China, with each side having its own interpretation.” What is clear is that between the KMT, the DPP and the CCP, there are “three Taiwans, with each party having its own preferred interpretation.”
Jiang’s performance at the Tokyo International Film Festival was for the benefit of the press, but it actually served to close the distance between the KMT and the DPP’s definition of Taiwan. At the same time, it also widened and made the gap between the definition of the two political parties in Taiwan and the CCP clearer than ever.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS