President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) interpretation of the Cairo Declaration, issued on Dec. 1, 1943, as the legal basis of Taiwan’s “return” to the Republic of China (ROC) after World War II was not only incorrect, but also dangerous because his rhetoric was exactly the same as that of Beijing, pro-independence advocates said yesterday.
“[Ma’s interpretation] fits right in with the ‘one China’ framework, which would be interpreted by the international community as saying Taiwan is part of China because hardly anyone would recognize the China in ‘one China’ framework as referring to the ROC,” Taiwan Society President Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲), a former president of the Academia Historica, told a press conference.
The Treaty of San Francisco, signed on Sept. 8, 1951, should have been the only legal document to determine Taiwan’s status, not the Cairo Declaration in 1943, nor the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, Chang and other experts said at the press conference, held almost at the same time as a commemoration ceremony for the 70th anniversary of the First Cairo Conference, organized by the Presidential Office.
Photo: Wang Min-wei, Taipei Times
Since Ma took the same position on the declaration as Beijing, which cited it as the legal basis for Taiwan’s return to China, he is risking two important issues, said Vincent Chen (陳文賢), a professor at National Chengchi University’s Graduate Institute of Taiwan History.
“With Ma taking the same position, Beijing could bolster its argument about Chinese sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台), which it claimed had been returned to China along with Taiwan and Penghu in the declaration,” Chen said.
“[Ma’s] adherence to the ‘one-China’ framework could, in the long run, create a false perception among the international community that Taipei and Beijing would follow the post-World War II unification models of Vietnam and Germany and unify in the future,” he said.
While the declaration, which was released in the form of a press communique after the meeting of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill in Cairo, said that “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China,” the ROC referred to the country which was in the state of war with Japan, not the country which is now in Taiwan with different people and territory from “the old ROC,” Taiwan Nation Alliance convener Yao Chia-wen (姚嘉文) said.
The context of the Cairo Declaration would be better interpreted by examining the post-World War II developments and comments made by leaders of involved countries, the advocates said.
Yao said that Churchill told the British parliament on Feb. 1, 1955, that he would not accept the view that the declaration could be used as a binding document to claim that China has sovereignty over Taiwan, adding that Japan’s prime minister and foreign minister had also made it clear that Japan renounced its claim over Taiwan and did not hand it to anyone.
Since the declaration was not a treaty but a communique, it did not transfer Taiwan’s sovereignty, Provisional Government of Formosa executive secretary Sim Kian-tek (沈建德) said.
Moreover, the communique was not signed by any leaders because Roosevelt and Churchill had different views about how to handle Taiwan’s future, Sim said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching