Former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) accepted the surrender of the Axis powers on behalf of the Allies at the conclusion of World War II and occupied Taiwan.
For more than 70 years, wartime documents such as the 1943 Cairo Communique and the 1945 Potsdam Declaration were used as the basis for the idea of “restoring” Taiwan and Penghu to the Republic of China (ROC).
Finally, the Ministry of Education has decided to address this and has removed it from the new curriculum guidelines for senior-high schools. This is a major step toward achieving an accurate reflection of reality in our education system.
The revised description of “Taiwan’s status” released in June by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still misrepresents and exaggerates these wartime documents, but it at least concedes that it is only the foreign ministry’s viewpoint to “regard” these historical documents as legal documents having the force of treaties.
Therefore, the Treaty of Peace with Japan signed in 1951 merely “reaffirms” the restoration of Taiwan and Penghu to the ROC.
Aside from these well-worn arguments, the foreign ministry’s description adequately reflects reality, treating Taiwan as the main body of the state, and refers to Taiwan’s status from the perspective of democracy:
First, in terms of the argument of sovereignty, it goes from “effective governance” in the sense of an occupying force to the constitutional “sovereignty in the people.”
Second, it uses the constitutional “citizen” to define the ROC.
Third, it emphasizes that the Cairo Communique only said that Taiwan and Penghu shall be restored to the “ROC” to avoid using the word “China.”
On the dispute regarding Taiwan and Penghu’s sovereign status after the war, only the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Chiang regime took the Cairo Communique and other documents as the grounds on which to insist that Taiwan and Penghu are to be returned to respectively China or the ROC, without recognizing the legal fact that the Treaty of San Francisco and the Treaty between the ROC and Japan did not decide Taiwan and Penghu’s fate.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the CCP insist that the Cairo Communique is binding, but they clearly, and erroneously, overstate the situation. Then-US president Franklin Roosevelt feared that Chiang would surrender and agreed to hold the “Three Great Allies” military conference near Cairo with Chiang and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill, to give Chiang some face.
This conference was mainly on military issues: No US Department of State officials were present and Chiang was only accompanied by a foreign ministry official, while Churchill was accompanied by a senior British Foreign Office official.
The document, known as the Cairo Declaration, is a press communique drafted on the spot and released after the meeting had ended and the participants had left.
The terms used in this press communique were what the three parties had agreed — and it was not signed.
In the wartime diplomatic documents complied by Chin Hsiao-yi (秦孝儀) and published by the Committee of KMT History, this document was called a “press communique” rather than a “declaration.”
In his report to the foreign ministry, then-ROC ambassador to the US Wei Tao-ming (魏道明) only said that the White House released the “announcement” points of the Cairo Conference.
The US “regards” the Cairo Communique and the Potsdam Declaration as the Allies’ “declaration of intent,” not as documents dealing with the sovereignty of Taiwan and Penghu, and these two documents have never been included in the Treaties in Force report published by the State Department.
However, it was just because in the announcement it declares that Taiwan and Penghu shall be restored to the ROC that the KMT government, which was defeated in the Chinese Civil War, insists that the Cairo Communique is binding; and the CCP, which claims it inherited the KMT government in China, thus insists that Taiwan and Penghu were returned to China.
However, the Treaty of San Francisco was the legal document ending the war and dealing with the respective territories of the defeated countries.
As the Allies did not agree on whether it was to be the ROC or the PRC that Taiwan and Penghu would be restored to, it was decided that in the Treaty of San Francisco Japan merely “renounces” all right, title and claim to Taiwan and Penghu, without stating to which entity Taiwan and Penghu should be returned — hence the unsettled legal status of Taiwan.
The treaty has never been amended, and there has never been any international conference or document to succeed it, either. The issue of Taiwan and Penghu’s sovereignty remains unresolved.
During a question-and-answer session in the legislature, then-minister of foreign affairs George Yeh (葉公超), who was in charge of negotiating the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, could only argue that “Taiwan and Penghu are Chinese territories. After Japan’s renouncement, only China has the right to take over. The reality is, we now control Taiwan and Penghu and they are clearly parts of our territory. However, the tricky international situation does not allow them to be our territory. Under the current circumstances, Japan has no right to transfer Taiwan and Penghu to us; even if they are willing to, we cannot accept the transfer…”
The Treaty of San Francisco’s failure to deal with the issue of Taiwan and Penghu’s sovereignty was dismissed as “absurd” by former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來), who said that the Chinese government did not recognize it and the treaty was void.
Zhou mocked Chiang’s insistence that he represented the whole of China. The status of the land Chiang occupied at the time — Taiwan and Penghu — remained undecided, leaving Chiang’s government in limbo.
Since the democratization of Taiwan, all of its governments, apart from that of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), have taken Taiwan as the main body of the state, so the status of Taiwan was settled, not being left unsettled as in the treaties.
The sovereignty of Taiwan and Penghu comes not from the long-term effective occupation and rule by the KMT government, but from Japan renouncing its sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu and the subsequent long-term democratic evolution, meaning that their sovereignty belongs to the people of Taiwan.
The most significant progress in the foreign ministry’s new description of “Taiwan’s status” is to highlight the discourse of “sovereignty in the people”: The fate of the “ROC” is inseparable from that of Taiwan — the “ROC” has implemented a democratic system, direct legislative elections and direct presidential elections in Taiwan, and it has completely realized the idea of constitutional sovereignty in the citizenry.
According to the ROC Constitution, the sovereignty of the ROC resides in the whole body of “citizens,” and ROC “citizens” are the people possessing the nationality of the ROC — this is to use “citizens” to define the “ROC,” so that the 23 million citizens in Taiwan and Penghu constitute their own country.
This basis for the argument places it on firm ground, replacing “sovereign legitimacy” with democracy. Although this is not yet universally recognized, it is a solid basis from which to argue.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Lin Lee-Kai
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