On Oct. 10, the nation celebrated Double Ten National Day, commemorating the 1911 Wuchang Uprising that led to the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912. Today marks Retrocession Day, to commemorate Japan’s surrender of Taiwan and Penghu in 1945, and the “return” of those territories to the ROC after 50 years of Japanese colonial rule. There is a problem in that timeline.
The birth of a nation speaks of beginnings, hope and potential. Retrocession suggests a restitution of a natural order: Not a beginning, but a point from which a process rudely interrupted can start anew. Whether to celebrate the birth of the ROC as Taiwan’s national day depends on the view of the relationship between the ROC and Taiwan. Retrocession Day is far more complicated.
The historical basis for saying that the “retrocession” meant “the return of the former Japanese colonies of Taiwan and Penghu” is shaky; that they were returned to a specific government is questionable; that they were returned to the ROC is chronologically inaccurate — the Qing Dynasty ceded these territories to Imperial Japan in 1895, almost two decades before the ROC existed — and the implication of this for the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) claim that Taiwan and Penghu now belong to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a matter of inventive interpretation, as the PRC was established even later, in 1949, years after Japan’s surrender.
There was no Chinese victory over Japan to end the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. That war was ended by the Allies’ victory in the Pacific Theater with the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Japan’s surrender signaled its surrender to the Allies, it was not in any way a transfer of sovereignty, which would have required a treaty. The Allies asked the representatives of the ROC to receive the Japanese surrender on their behalf, not to officially assume sovereignty. By some accounts the surrender ceremony took place in Taipei’s Zhongshan Hall. At the time the location was known as the Taihoku Public Hall: The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), still active in China, later renamed it Zhongshan after the founder of the ROC.
The Allies considered the sovereign status of Taiwan to be undetermined pending a treaty. That never happened; the CCP expelled the KMT from China in 1949, ironically leaving Taiwan’s status undetermined.
The PRC and ROC cannot even agree on the years of the Second Sino-Japanese War: The former officially marks the beginning as the Sept. 18, 1931, Mukden Incident. From one perspective, to understand cross-strait tensions today, you have to understand that the ROC and the PRC are still at war. A more extreme perspective is that the representative of China, be it the PRC or the ROC, is still at war with Japan.
Speaking in 2015, the 70th anniversary of Retrocession Day, former Veterans Affairs Commission chairman Hsu Li-nung (許歷農) said that the war with Japan was far from over, and that Japan has cultivated pro-Taiwan independence advocates, including Japanese not deported from Taiwan at the end of the war.
Modern vernacular uses phrases such as “alternative facts” in a “post-truth world,” but there is little new in this. Facts are not established, they are plucked from the flow of historical events and circumstances to feed a narrative, narratives are used to support agendas, and everyone has their own agenda. Retrocession Day is a perfect example of this.
If Retrocession Day means anything in Taiwan today, it should be an opportunity for reflection, clarification and consensus of what it describes and what it means.
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