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Advocates clarify
proof of sovereignty
CHANGED TIMES: The president’s citing of wartime
treaties fails to address the fact that Japan has never transferred Taiwan’s
sovereignty to any country, an expert said
By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) repeated
citing of the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Declaration as proof that
Taiwan’s sovereignty belongs to the Republic of China (ROC) ignores the
historical context of those documents and the development of international
status, pro-independence advocates said yesterday.
“Taiwan’s status under international law should be based on the Treaty of San
Francisco, in which Japan renounced its sovereignty over Formosa (Taiwan) and
the Pescadores (Penghu), but never said which country Taiwan belonged to,”
former Academia Historica president Chang Yen-hsien (張炎憲) told a seminar held to
revisit the treaty signed in 1951.
Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) was invited to join then-US president
Franklin Roosevelt and then-British prime minister Winston Churchill in Cairo,
where the clause that proposed to return Taiwan and the Pescadores to the ROC
was added to the declaration to force Chiang Kai-shek to “stay in the battle”
because he was said to be considering signing a peace treaty with Japan at the
time, Chang Yen-hsien said.
If Chiang Kai-shek had done so, it would have created pressure on the Allied
forces which were fighting Germany in Europe because Japanese troops could have
joined the European battlegrounds, he added.
While the Potsdam Declaration used the same rhetoric of the Cairo Declaration in
terms of Taiwan’s future, they were wartime documents and when the Korean War
broke out, then-US president Harry Truman was forced to reconsider Taiwan’s
status, which he later said remained undetermined, Chang added.
Ma’s citing of those documents fails to address the changing international
political dynamics and the fact that Japan has never transferred Taiwan’s
sovereignty to any country, Chang added.
Historian Lee Hsiao-feng (李筱峰) said that the US and UK expressed opposition in
1946 to the KMT regime’s unilateral decision to “restore ROC nationality in
Taiwan” because the Chiang Kai-shek administration was only performing a UN
order for a temporary military occupation of Taiwan.
Lee added that, regardless of how the Treaty of San Francisco and the Treaty of
Taipei — which was signed in 1952 between Japan and the ROC government — were
interpreted, one thing is sure: Taiwan has never been part of the People’s
Republic of China’s territory.
“That is why Taiwanese should be very concerned about Ma’s political identity,
which has always been a ‘one China’ identity,” Lee said.
Many policies and advocacies of Ma’s political career are solid evidence of his
‘one China’ belief, such as his insistence on the implementation of Hanyu Pinyin
for Mandarin, diplomatic truce, his refusal of US military assistance during
Typhoon Morakot in 2009 and Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Assembly
as a province of China, among others.
“Ma had those policies and positions because of one reason — his China-centric
historical view. He always interpreted international politics and domestic
affairs as a Chinese rather than a Taiwanese,” Lee said.
“I would say that is the biggest threat for Taiwanese right now,” he said.
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