President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) yesterday said that commemorating the 1945 recovery of Taiwan by the Republic of China (ROC) is an unshirkable responsibility of each and every ROC president.
Ma made the remarks at a celebration marking the 70th anniversary of “Retrocession Day” at the Zhongshan Hall in Taipei, where the then-ROC government accepted the surrender of Japan.
Retrocession Day, on Oct. 25 is the day the KMT say Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his Nationalist forces liberated Taiwan in 1945 after 50 years of Japanese occupation and Taiwan’s supposed return to Chinese rule.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
“On the 70th anniversary of Taiwan’s retrocession, we chose to expand the scale of the annual celebration, because today is also the day we celebrate the closely intertwined relationship between the ROC and Taiwan, which are as close as lips and teeth,” Ma said.
In light of Japan’s aggression against the ROC to annex territory in northeast China in the 1930s, Ma said that Chiang, then the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) army generalissimo started advocating for the recovery of Taiwan, before abrogating the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki — by which the Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan — and declaring war against Japan in 1941.
In addition, the Cairo Declaration — signed by Chiang, then-US president Franklin Roosevelt and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill on Dec. 1, 1943, following a conference in Egypt’s capital — also set forth a consensus that Japan would have to restore Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands (Penghu) and Manchuria to the ROC, Ma said.
“Eventually, Taiwan returned to the embrace of the ROC following its 1945 victory in the eight-year anti-Japanese war,” Ma said.
The ROC is only able to enjoy freedom, democracy and prosperity because of its safeguard and efforts to build up Taiwan, Ma said.
“That is why it is the inescapable duty of each and every ROC president to commemorate this part of history,” he added.
Ma’s statement appeared to be directed at Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) who did not attend Retrocession Day celebrations.
Ma said the Cairo Declaration played a key role in the ROC’s recovery of Taiwan.
“On July 26, 1945, the ROC, the US and the UK jointly issued the Potsdam Declaration, which called for the surrender of all Japanese armed forces and stipulated that the terms of the Cairo Declaration be carried out,” Ma said.
On Aug. 15 of the same year, Japan accepted the Potsdam terms and agreed to unconditional surrender, Ma said, adding that two paragraphs in the official Instrument of Surrender, signed by Japanese representatives about a month later, also reiterated its pledge to abide by the Potsdam Declaration.
Moreover, Ma said the Peace Treaty signed between Japan and the KMT regime in Taipei on April 28, 1952, also included Japan’s renouncement of sovereignty over Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands, the nullification contents of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, and acknowledgment that the inhabitants of Taiwan at the time had ROC nationality.
“These documents served as confirmation that the ROC had recovered Taiwan,” Ma added.
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