Taiwan’s sovereign status was determined by the Treaty of San Francisco on Sept. 8, 1951, not the Cairo Declaration in 1943, nor the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信) said on Friday, ahead of the 62nd anniversary of the treaty’s signing.
“Only the Treaty of San Francisco — not the two declarations made during World War II — is recognized as a legitimate international law. The Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] has been cheating Taiwanese by claiming that Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China [ROC] government,” Hsu, a former Academia Historica president, told a news conference.
Article 2 of the San Francisco Treaty, signed between Japan and most of the Allied powers, states that “Japan renounces all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores (澎湖),” while the Treaty of Taipei — the peace treaty signed between the ROC and Japan on April 28, 1952 — declares Japan’s “renouncement to all right, title and claim to Taiwan (Formosa) and Penghu (the Pescadores) as well as the Spratly Islands [Nansha Islands, 南沙群島] and the Paracel Islands [Xisha Islands, 西沙群島],” Hsu said.
Japan has never said which country Taiwan belonged to and “the only sure thing was that Taiwan’s sovereignty has been separated from that of China,” he said.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) claim that sovereignty over Taiwan was returned to the ROC with Tokyo’s surrender is a distortion of history because the surrender is not a transfer of sovereignty, the lawmaker said.
Even more dangerous is that Ma’s position echoes that of Beijing’s, which means that China could use this as a base from which to claim Taiwan as its territory, Hsu said.
In addition, KMT officials would not have been able to arrive in Taiwan after World War II without the help of US naval vessels and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in Taiwan after Allied Forces General Douglas MacArthur assigned him to do so, said Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲), another former Academia Historica president.
“Chiang’s military occupation of Taiwan does not mean that the KMT regime obtained sovereignty over it,” Chang said.
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The Chinese military has built landing bridge ships designed to expand its amphibious options for a potential assault on Taiwan, but their combat effectiveness is limited due to their high vulnerability, a defense expert said in an analysis published on Monday. Shen Ming-shih (沈明室), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that the deployment of such vessels as part of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy’s East Sea Fleet signals a strong focus on Taiwan. However, the ships are highly vulnerable to precision strikes, which means they could be destroyed before they achieve their intended
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REWRITING HISTORY: China has been advocating a ‘correct’ interpretation of the victory over Japan that brings the CCP’s contributions to the forefront, an expert said An elderly Chinese war veteran’s shin still bears the mark of a bullet wound he sustained when fighting the Japanese as a teenager, a year before the end of World War II. Eighty years on, Li Jinshui’s scar remains as testimony to the bravery of Chinese troops in a conflict that killed millions of their people. However, the story behind China’s overthrow of the brutal Japanese occupation is deeply contested. Historians broadly agree that credit for victory lies primarily with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-led Republic of China (ROC) Army. Its leader, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), fled to Taiwan in 1949 after losing a
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