A petition calling on the German government to establish formal ties with Taiwan was submitted to the Bundestag on Wednesday last week by a group of Germans.
The petition asks the Bundestag to ask the German Cabinet to establish formal relations with the Republic of China (Taiwan).
It says that as a country that “disregards human rights, blocks entire ethnic groups into ‘re-education camps,’ builds a unique surveillance and censorship machine, brutally defies the concerns of other states in territorial conflicts in Southeast Asia and violates international law,” China should not represent democratic Taiwan.
Photo: Screen grab from the Web site of the Petitions Committee of the German Bundestag
If the petition receives 50,000 signatures before its expiry on Oct. 9, the Bundestag is required to discuss it.
As the world marks the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China continues to oppress its people, but the German government nevertheless engages in diplomacy and trade with China, the petition says.
The petition says denying Taiwan UN membership has no international legal basis.
“The Cairo Declaration of 1943, in which the Allies promised China the return of Taiwan after the war, was not binding under international law,” it says.
The petition asks why Germany cannot recognize “two Chinas,” even though the UN recognized two German states for decades, and treats North and South Korea equally.
Unlike China, Taiwan has democratized, but despite this, it is not formally recognized by Germany, it says.
“This is incomprehensible to us given the massive violations of international and human rights by the [People’s Republic of China] described above. We therefore demand diplomatic recognition of the Republic of China,” it says.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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