President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has published an op-ed article in the Washington Times harshly criticizing former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) for saying the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) belong to Japan, where they are known as the Senkaku Islands.
“Former or future presidents should not be cavalier about, or forsake, our national sovereignty,” Ma said.
The article was almost immediately attacked by Gerrit van der Wees, a senior policy adviser to the Formosan Association for Public Affairs, who called it “flabbergasting.”
“It seems President Ma is making a big issue out of the matter, as his Chinese Nationalist [Party, KMT] is in deep decline and looks set to lose the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections,” Van der Wees said in a statement.
Other Washington-based Taiwan watchers said it was “highly unusual” for a sitting president to criticize a former president in a foreign newspaper.
During a visit to Japan last month, Lee, who is 92 years old and known as Taiwan’s “father of democracy,” said that “the Diaoyutai Islands belong to Japan and are not Taiwanese territory.”
In a lengthy rebuttal, Ma said that based on strong historical evidence and international law, Japan returned the Diaoyutai Islands to the Republic of China (ROC) in 1945.
He said that between 1722 and 1872, numerous official reports confirm that the Diaoyutai Islands were regularly used by Taiwanese fishermen and effectively patrolled by the Qing Dynasty.
Ma said that on April 17, 1895, the Qing government and Japan signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, which stipulated “the island of Taiwan, together with all the islands appertaining or belonging to Taiwan” were ceded to Japan.
However, during World War II, the ROC declared war on Japan and abrogated the Treaty of Shimonoseki.
Ma said that under the 1943 Cairo Declaration “all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese … shall be restored to the ROC.”
In 1945, the Potsdam Proclamation, the provisions of which Japan accepted, confirmed the Cairo Declaration.
The 1951 Treaty of San Francisco stated that Japan renounced sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu, and sovereignty over the Diaoyutai Islands was returned to the ROC in October 1945.
“Prior to the signing of the Okinawa Reversion Agreement in June 1971 between the US and Japan, the US notified the ROC that only administrative rights over the Diaoyutai Islands were being transferred to Japan — not sovereignty — and that the agreement had no effect on the ROC’s sovereignty claim,” Ma said.
He concluded: “It is my solemn duty to protect our sovereignty and fishing rights with regard to the Diaoyutai Islands.”
Van der Wees said that “by focusing on the emotional issue of sovereignty over the small group of rocks,” Ma is stoking nationalistic fervor to regain ground for the KMT.
“Ma’s arguments regrettably do not hold water — he attempts to marshal some anecdotal evidence that the islands at some point in time may have been under Chinese rule, but does not present any direct evidence that the islands were ever administered by any of the Chinese empires,” Van der Wees said.
He added that Ma neglected to mention that Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣中正) government — as well as the Chinese government — only started to lay claim to the islands after 1971, when reports surfaced that there might be oil deposits near them.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS