The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) repeated citing of the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Declaration as proof that Taiwan’s sovereignty belongs to the Republic of China (ROC) ignores the historical context of those documents and the development of international status, pro-independence advocates said yesterday.
“Taiwan’s status under international law should be based on the Treaty of San Francisco, in which Japan renounced its sovereignty over Formosa (Taiwan) and the Pescadores (Penghu), but never said which country Taiwan belonged to,” former Academia Historica president Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲) told a seminar held to revisit the treaty signed in 1951.
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was invited to join then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill in Cairo, where the clause that proposed to return Taiwan and the Pescadores to the ROC was added to the declaration to force Chiang Kai-shek to “stay in the battle” because he was said to be considering signing a peace treaty with Japan at the time, Chang Yen-hsien said.
If Chiang Kai-shek had done so, it would have created pressure on the Allied forces which were fighting Germany in Europe because Japanese troops could have joined the European battlegrounds, he added.
While the Potsdam Declaration used the same rhetoric of the Cairo Declaration in terms of Taiwan’s future, they were wartime documents and when the Korean War broke out, then-US president Harry Truman was forced to reconsider Taiwan’s status, which he later said remained undetermined, Chang added.
Ma’s citing of those documents fails to address the changing international political dynamics and the fact that Japan has never transferred Taiwan’s sovereignty to any country, Chang added.
Historian Lee Hsiao-feng (李筱峰) said that the US and UK expressed opposition in 1946 to the KMT regime’s unilateral decision to “restore ROC nationality in Taiwan” because the Chiang Kai-shek administration was only performing a UN order for a temporary military occupation of Taiwan.
Lee added that, regardless of how the Treaty of San Francisco and the Treaty of Taipei — which was signed in 1952 between Japan and the ROC government — were interpreted, one thing is sure: Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China’s territory.
“That is why Taiwanese should be very concerned about Ma’s political identity, which has always been a ‘one China’ identity,” Lee said.
Many policies and advocacies of Ma’s political career are solid evidence of his ‘one China’ belief, such as his insistence on the implementation of Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin, diplomatic truce, his refusal of US military assistance during Typhoon Morakot in 2009 and Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Assembly as a province of China, among others.
“Ma had those policies and positions because of one reason — his China-centric historical view. He always interpreted international politics and domestic affairs as a Chinese rather than a Taiwanese,” Lee said.
“I would say that is the biggest threat for Taiwanese right now,” he said.
FATAL FIRE: The health department is trying to contact the inspector who visited the site of the illegal nursing home to ask why they did not advise follow-up checks The Taipei City Government yesterday said that a health department inspector last year had visited the site of a long-term care facility in Neihu District (內湖) after receiving a report questioning its status. A fire broke out at the facility on Tuesday afternoon, killing three people. The Taipei Fire Department said that it received a report about a fire on the first floor of a four-story residential building on Kangning Road Sec. 1 at 2:38pm on Tuesday, firefighters arrived at 2:43pm and the fire was put out by 3:07pm. The firefighters found three men in beds and rushed them to hospital for
Taipei City Councilor Wang Hao (王浩) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on Monday called for security improvements to the MRT, as fare evasion has increased more than 13-fold on the metropolitan railway system over the past five years. Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) has spoken out against fare evasion and other contraventions of MRT regulations, but since he took office in 2015 the number of contraventions has more than doubled, Wang said, adding that there were 537 cases in 2015 compared with 959 last year. A video was posted to YouTube in June showing people how to evade paying a fare,
THE CHINA CONNECTION: As Beijing’s aggression increases, so does Taiwanese consciousness, making a new constitution imperative, Hsu Wei-chun said If the nation is to ratify a new constitution, it must first end any illusions about the current document’s relevance to Taiwan, an academic told a forum in Taipei yesterday. For the constitutional revisionist movement to succeed, it needs public enthusiasm, the right timing and a clear plan of action, Chung Yuan Christian University associate professor Hsu Wei-chun (徐偉群) told attendees at the event titled “Imagining a New Constitution for a New Era,” which was organized by the National Taiwan University Graduate Student Association. The Constitution exists under the “one China” framework and has little relevance to Taiwan, Hsu said, adding that
Yuchi Township (魚池) fishers have appealed to the Nantou County Government for help in dealing with an invasive fish species in Sun Moon Lake (日月潭), where it has devastated the local ecosystem. Fishers at Sun Moon Lake have been using electrofishing in an attempt to eliminate the giant snakehead fish — found in Africa and Southeast Asia — but they have struggled to keep up with the growing population of the species, which breeds during September and October, the county government said on Monday. The county has contacted researchers at National Tsing Hua University, saying it hoped they could come up
RSS