This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) has made repeated claims that the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration affirm that Taiwan was to be “returned to China.” However, as the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said on Friday last week, such statements are groundless — these documents are far from determining Taiwan’s political status.
International law speaks for itself. The 1943 Cairo Declaration was issued by the Republic of China (ROC), the US and the UK as a wartime communique without the binding power of a treaty. The Potsdam Declaration was the ultimatum subsequently delivered to Japan on July 26, 1945, based on the Cairo blueprint, which Japan accepted on Sept. 2 of the same year with its signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender. None of these documents address Taiwanese sovereignty.
The only legally binding document is the Treaty of San Francisco, signed on Sept. 8, 1951, by Japan and 48 Allied nations. It sets out that Japan “renounces all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores” without specifying where those rights were transferred to, forming a basis for the theory of Taiwan’s undetermined status.
By that point, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) had already existed for two years since its establishment in 1949, so neither the PRC nor the ROC were invited to sign the treaty over legitimacy disputes. To fill this diplomatic and legal vacuum, the Treaty of Taipei was signed by the ROC and Japan on April 28, 1952, further marking an end to the war and Japanese renunciation of Taiwan, Penghu, and the Spratly (Nansha, 南沙) and Paracel (Xisha, 西沙) islands. Once again, to whom power was transferred was not explicitly stated. In other words, there is no clear consensus that Taiwanese sovereignty was to be “returned to China” after the end of WWII.
The US position has remained consistent. US Department of State records show that after the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, then-US president Harry Truman sent the Seventh Fleet to protect Taiwan, saying that “the determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.” The question at hand, therefore, is left unresolved.
Faced with this distortion of history from Beijing, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) seems to be making extraordinary allowances. The same KMT that once asserted how the ROC army led the war of resistance against Japan and championed the Cairo Declaration as a diplomatic success now seems to be shrinking. Today, the KMT hardly dares to stake a claim to an argument, even echoing Beijing in cross-strait discussions.
The ROC is the signatory to the Cairo Declaration, not the PRC. In 2021, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office smeared the Treaty of San Francisco as an “illegal and invalid waste of paper.” Yet the KMT, for the sake of newfound political interests, allows the PRC to rewrite its own history of resistance.
Revisiting history 80 years on, we are reminded that Taiwan’s status under international law is undetermined, and the AIT has reiterated that Beijing’s line on the matter is factually baseless. If the KMT remains silent, it exposes only its own internal contradictions and cowardice. On this, the Taiwanese must be absolutely clear.
Liou Je-wei is a teacher.
Translated by Gilda Knox Streader.
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