After former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) reasserted his long-held view that sovereignty over the disputed Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) in the East China Sea lies with Japan, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) submitted an opinion piece to the Washington Times, a US newspaper that few people are interested in these days.
It seems as if Ma was so pressed to comment on the issue that he picked the first outlet that came to mind without giving it too much thought. Perhaps he was visited by a ghost during Ghost Month and it terrified him to the point that he lost his bearings and could no longer think straight.
The Washington Times is used by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) to reprocess its international statements for domestic consumption. While the newspaper still exists, it has lost relevance in Washington, and that Ma would submit an opinion piece to it in his capacity as president in an attempt to mislead his Taiwanese audience is nothing short of a disgrace.
Ma said Lee’s claim that the Diaoyutai Islands belong to Japan “contravenes historical fact, the ROC Constitution, and international law.” However, the Constitution does not mention the Diaoyutais, the call on historical fact is a joke and it is not true that “sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands was returned to the Republic of China, along with Taiwan,” based on international law in 1945.
When World War II ended, the US occupied the Ryukyu Islands, including the Diaoyutais, and then formally took them into trusteeship in accordance with the 1952 Treaty of San Francisco. The US then made an unequivocal statement that its jurisdiction included the Diaoyutais, without any objections from the KMT government. It was only when the US was returning the Ryukyus to Japan in 1972 that China claimed sovereignty over them and engineered a movement to protect the Diaoyutais. This forced a reaction from the KMT government, which prompted Ma and other young people to engage in the Diaoyutais protection movement.
Following the KMT government’s involvement, the US issued another statement saying that the Ryukyu Islands had been placed in its trusteeship by the Treaty of San Francisco and that they would be returned to Japan in accordance with the agreement between the US and Japan, adding that if there were any sovereignty disputes during this period, such disputes should be resolved through talks by the involved parties.
According to Tokyo, there is no sovereignty dispute and Japan therefore refuses to enter into negotiations with Taipei. Chow Shu-kai (周書楷), Taiwan’s minister of foreign affairs at the time, met with Henry Kissinger, who was then-US national security advisor to the US president, and his only demand was that the US maintain a low profile when they handed the islands back to Japan. Kissinger then asked Chow: “Your government does not want to reclaim these islands, you only want to avoid a lot of hyperbole, is that right?”
Chow agreed with Kissinger.
Claiming sovereignty and then turning around and saying that you do not want to reclaim the islands; what kind of nonsense is this?
Ma will not criticize the Chiang (蔣) family for selling out Taiwan, but he has no problem attacking Lee. The obvious reason is electoral concerns, but there is also a hidden agenda: Ma wants to cooperate with Beijing in rejecting the Treaty of San Francisco in order to create a theoretical foundation for the People’s Republic of China’s claim that it inherited sovereignty over Taiwan.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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