With the 79th session of the UN General Assembly set to hold its General Debate from Tuesday next week, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that Taiwan this year would focus on challenging and refuting China’s misinterpretation and misuse of UN Resolution 2758, highlighting its fight against China’s hegemonic diplomacy and lawfare to exclude Taiwan from international society.
UN Resolution 2758 states that the General Assembly recognizes “that the representatives of the Government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are the only lawful representatives of China to the UN” and “expel[s] forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) from the place which they unlawfully occupy at the UN and all the organizations related to it.” The resolution does not mention Taiwan at all. Nevertheless, it has been misused by Beijing as a tool to push its “one China principle” and to block Taiwan’s international engagement.
Nauru’s decision in January to cut diplomatic ties with Taiwan on the grounds of UN Resolution 2758 and the “one China principle” demonstrated the risk that if the misunderstanding is not clarified soon, the cross-strait status quo that “neither Taiwan nor the PRC is subordinate to the other” would be subverted by China.
A growing number of democracies and like-minded states have begun questioning China’s false claims about Taiwan and UN Resolution 2758. Following the US House of Representatives’ passage of the Taiwan International Solidarity Act to counter China’s distortion of the resolution, US Deputy Assistant Secretary for China and Taiwan Mark Lambert in April openly expressed strong opposition to Beijing’s misrepresentation, and underlined that the resolution neither endorsed an international consensus on the “one China policy” nor “constitute a UN institutional position on the political status of Taiwan.” The German Marshall Foundation in Washington also released a research paper saying that China’s assertion that the resolution is the basis for its “one China principle” is a flawed legal assumption and argument.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) during its annual summit in July passed a model resolution on 2758 saying that it does not endorse the “one China principle” and that the lack of representation for millions of Taiwanese in the UN should be remedied. IPAC delegates vowed to pass similar resolutions in their respective countries. The summit was attended by 49 members from 24 countries.
Meanwhile, Australia was the first country whose senate unanimously passed a motion regarding the misinterpretation of UN Resolution 2758. The Dutch House of Representatives also passed a motion rejecting Beijing’s distortion of the UN resolution and requested that the Dutch government seek support for this position within the EU.
Since this year’s UN General Assembly’s theme is “Leaving no one behind: acting together for the advancement of peace, sustainable development and human dignity,” the government and civil groups in Taiwan have pledged to increase efforts in appealing to the UN and the international community to stop China from misrepresenting the resolution, as the UN has ironically left behind Taiwan’s 23.5 million people.
Regretfully, when Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers on Wednesday proposed passing a motion clarifying Taiwan’s stance on UN Resolution 2758, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party demurred and walked out of the meeting. This move should be considered as an acquiescence to China’s bullying and distortion of Taiwan’s sovereignty and international representation.
Taiwanese authorities should work with like-minded partners to explicate how to correctly interpret UN Resolution 2758 to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty. The public should also beware of Chinese toadies who are hindering Taiwan’s solidarity and facilitating the authoritarian regime’s efforts to isolate Taiwan.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS