Taiwan’s sovereign status was determined by the Treaty of San Francisco on Sept. 8, 1951, not the Cairo Declaration in 1943, nor the Potsdam Declaration of 1945, Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信) said on Friday, ahead of the 62nd anniversary of the treaty’s signing.
“Only the Treaty of San Francisco — not the two declarations made during World War II — is recognized as a legitimate international law. The Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] has been cheating Taiwanese by claiming that Taiwan was returned to the Republic of China [ROC] government,” Hsu, a former Academia Historica president, told a news conference.
Article 2 of the San Francisco Treaty, signed between Japan and most of the Allied powers, states that “Japan renounces all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores (澎湖),” while the Treaty of Taipei — the peace treaty signed between the ROC and Japan on April 28, 1952 — declares Japan’s “renouncement to all right, title and claim to Taiwan (Formosa) and Penghu (the Pescadores) as well as the Spratly Islands [Nansha Islands, 南沙群島] and the Paracel Islands [Xisha Islands, 西沙群島],” Hsu said.
Japan has never said which country Taiwan belonged to and “the only sure thing was that Taiwan’s sovereignty has been separated from that of China,” he said.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) claim that sovereignty over Taiwan was returned to the ROC with Tokyo’s surrender is a distortion of history because the surrender is not a transfer of sovereignty, the lawmaker said.
Even more dangerous is that Ma’s position echoes that of Beijing’s, which means that China could use this as a base from which to claim Taiwan as its territory, Hsu said.
In addition, KMT officials would not have been able to arrive in Taiwan after World War II without the help of US naval vessels and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in Taiwan after Allied Forces General Douglas MacArthur assigned him to do so, said Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲), another former Academia Historica president.
“Chiang’s military occupation of Taiwan does not mean that the KMT regime obtained sovereignty over it,” Chang said.
China appears to have built mockups of a port in northeastern Taiwan and a military vessel docked there, with the aim of using them as targets to test its ballistic missiles, a retired naval officer said yesterday. Lu Li-shih (呂禮詩), a former lieutenant commander in Taiwan’s navy, wrote on Facebook that satellite images appeared to show simulated targets in a desert in China’s Xinjiang region that resemble the Suao naval base in Yilan County and a Kidd-class destroyer that usually docks there. Lu said he compared the mockup port to US naval bases in Yokosuka and Sasebo, Japan, and in Subic Bay
Police are investigating the death of a Formosan black bear discovered on Tuesday buried near an industrial road in Nantou County, with initial evidence indicating that it was shot accidentally by a hunter. The bear had been caught in wildlife traps at least five times before, three times since 2020. Codenamed No. 711, the bear received extensive media coverage last year after it was discovered trapped twice in less than two months in the Taichung mountains. After its most recent ensnarement last month, the bear was released in the Dandashan (丹大山) area in Nantou County’s Sinyi Township (信義). However, officials became concerned after the
The majority of parents surveyed in northern Taiwan favor the suspension of all on-site classes at schools from the junior-high level and below amid a surge in domestic COVID-19 infections, parent groups said yesterday. About 84.4 percent of respondents in a survey of 2,912 parents in northern Taiwan, where the outbreak is the most serious, said they supported suspending classes, the Action Alliance on Basic Education, the Taiwan Parents Protect Women and Children Association, and the Taiwan Love Children Association said. The groups distributed questionnaires to parents in New Taipei City, Taipei, Keelung, Taoyuan and Hsinchu city and county from Saturday morning
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