Premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) yesterday defended the government after a Cabinet document charting the country’s territorial waters made Kinmen and Matsu appear to be parts of China.
“For 10 years Kinmen and Matsu have been deliberately left out [of the country’s official territorial waters] … Over the last 10 years the issue hasn’t been reviewed,” Wu said, referring to a previous version of the map drawn up in 1999.
Asked whether the government had made a secret deal with China on the issue, Wu dismissed the idea.
“There was no secret deal … There must have been some reason why the situation has remained this way for the past 10 years. It hasn’t changed no matter whether the Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] or the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] was in power,” Wu said.
Wu also said that Kinmen and Matsu not being included in the document’s boundary line was in line with the consensus on cross-strait relations — “to set aside disputes and create a win-win situation.”
“Kinmen and Matsu belong to Fujian Province … Although Kinmen and Matsu are under the Republic of China’s [ROC] jurisdiction, other parts of Fujian Province are under the jurisdiction of the mainland,” Wu said.
The furor came about after the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) said the Executive Yuan last Wednesday promulgated the revised regulations on the boundaries of the country’s territorial waters following demarcations defined in 1999 that excluded the Diaoyutai (釣魚台) and Paracel (西沙) islands as well as Kinmen and Matsu.
Although the document was promulgated with Wu’s name on it, Wu told reporters yesterday that “I did not know about it until I read about it in [yesterday’s] newspapers.”
The notice shows the ROC’s territorial waters and contiguous areas extend from Taiwan proper and its immediate offshore islands to include the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) in the Pacific Ocean, the Dongsha Islands (or the Pratas Islands, 東沙島) and Chongsha Bank (or Macclesfield Bank, 中沙群島) in the South China Sea.
The scope of the country’s territorial waters remained the same as announced in 1999, the first time the government made the demarcation based on the ROC Territorial Waters and Neighboring Areas Act (中華民國領海及鄰近區法), which was passed a year earlier.
The Ministry of the Interior, which was in charge of drawing up the document, said the purpose of the revisions was merely a technical fine-tuning to adjust to revised nautical charts after the army replaced its original coordination system with the international coordinate system WGS 84.
Executive Yuan Spokesman Su Jun-pin (蘇俊賓) released a press statement saying the government never considered giving up Kinmen and Matsu.
Presidential Office Spokesman Wang Yu-chi (王郁琦) yesterday said that the administration must include Kinmen and Matsu in “the territory of Taiwan” because they are “Taiwan’s legitimate dominion.”
Wang said Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) told the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee yesterday morning that Kinmen and Matsu would be included in the country’s territorial map within a year.
“Our position is that we should consider Kinmen and Matsu as two regions under the legal rule of Taiwan,” he said.
Wang said they did not know why the sea line around the outlying islets of Kinmen and Matsu was not included in the country’s territory when the government first promulgated the charts in 1999, but noted that the former DPP administration did nothing to change it.
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