Wednesday marked 72 years since Japan’s surrender was accepted in Taiwan. At the time, the Republic of China (ROC) was playing tricks and when Chen Yi (陳儀) handed Order No. 1 to General Rikichi Ando, Japan’s last governor-general of Taiwan, it had the text “Receiving the territory of Taiwan and the Penghu archipelago,” with the result that Ando did not sign the surrender document.
To this day, Ando’s surrender cannot be found in the ROC, although the acceptance of the surrender took place in Taiwan. This led to the lie that Taiwan and Penghu were handed over to the ROC through the Treaty of Taipei on April 28, 1952.
First, on Sept. 17, 1951, then-US ambassador to Taiwan Karl Ranking warned then-minister of foreign affairs George Yeh (葉公超) that the Treaty of Taipei could not imply that Taiwan became a de jure part of Chinese territory.
On May 13, 1952, the ROC’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) stated in Volume 54 addressing the peace treaty with Japan that “the San Francisco Peace Treaty only stipulates that Japan renounce sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu, but does not specify to whom, and this cannot be remedied through the peace treaty with Japan.”
On July 16, 1952, a Central Daily News article said: “In accordance with the Cairo Declaration, we have received Taiwan and Penghu, where we are exercising executive power, and there is no doubt that Taiwan and Penghu are part of our territory. The Treaty of Peace between the Republic of China and Japan has been executed exactly in accordance with the San Francisco Peace Treaty, and on this matter, we have done all we can to add further stipulations, but in the end, we did not achieve our goals.”
On July 23, 1952, Dispatch No. 31 from the US embassy in Taiwan reported to the US Department of State that Yeh had said that due to the delicate international situation, Taiwan and Penghu “do not belong to us. In the current situation, Japan has no right to hand over Formosa and Penghu to us, nor can we accept such a transfer from Japan even if it so wishes.”
However, MOFA says that no such files exist.
On July 13, 1971, then-US Department of State legal adviser Robert Starr in a note to Office of Republic of China Affairs director Charles Sylvester confirmed the text in the previous point, “nor can we accept such a transfer from Japan even if it so wishes.”
Sim Kiantek is a former associate professor in the Department of Business Administration at National Chung Hsing University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
Criticisms of corruption, a poorly managed bureaucracy and uninformed, unprincipled or unaccomplished policy in China are often met with harsh punishments. Many protesters in the “blank paper movement,” for example, have been disappeared by the authorities. Meanwhile, the WHO has asked China to provide data on its COVID-19 situation, with the Chinese government choosing to disseminate propaganda instead. The first amendment of the US Constitution, written in 1791, prohibits the US government from abridging the freedom of speech, press, assembly, petition, or religion. More than 200 years later, China, the world’s second-largest economy, still lacks the freedoms of speech and the press,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the pride of the nation, has recently become a villain to residents of Tainan’s Annan District (安南). In 2017, TSMC announced plans to build the world’s first 3-nanometer fab in Anding District (安定). While the project was once welcomed by residents of Tainan, it has since become a source of controversy. The new fab requires a huge amount of electricity to operate. To meet TSMC’s surging electricity demand, plans are under way to construct a 1.2 gigawatt gas power station near a residential area in Annan District. More than 10,000 Annan residents have signed a petition
As the People’s Republic of China (PRC) constantly strives to rewrite the Taiwan narrative, it is important to regularly update and correct the stereotypes that the PRC tries to foist on Taiwan and the world. A primary stereotype is that Taiwan has always been a part of China and its corollary that Taiwan has been a part of China since time immemorial. Both are false. Taiwan has always been a part of the vast Austronesian empire, which stretched from Madagascar in the west to Easter Island in the east and from Taiwan in the north to New Zealand in the south. That
I first visited Taiwan in 1985, when I was deputed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama to start a dialogue with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). I spent three days talking to officials, the end result being the signing of an agreement where the Republic of China (ROC) recognized the right to self-determination of Tibetans. According to official KMT records in Nanking, Tibet never paid taxes to the ROC government. In 1997, the Dalai Lama made his first ever visit to Taiwan on the invitation of then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝). Lee took the bold step of opening Taiwan’s doors to