Alfred Tsai offered a good summary of Taiwan's situation (Letters, Nov. 6, page 8) when he said: "Both the pan-blue and pan-green camps are misleading people when they declare that Taiwan is part of China or that Taiwan is an independent, sovereign nation."
In the book The Creation of States in International Law (2nd edition), author James Crawford, speaking of the Cairo and Potsdam Declarations and the San Francisco Peace Treaty, wrote: "The cession of territory at the end of a war must await the peace treaty ... the problem was that, in 1951, there was no agreement between the signatories as to which government represented that State (`China'). Until 1952, the position of the Republic of China [ROC] in Taiwan was that of a belligerent occupant and, after 1949, government-in-exile of China."
The analysis underlines the fact that there was no transfer of the sovereignty of Taiwan to the ROC upon the Oct. 25, 1945, surrender of Japanese troops on the island.
Furthermore, since international law does not recognize any methods or procedures by which a "government-in-exile" can become the lawfully recognized government of its current locality of residence, it is clear that all actions aimed at gaining more international diplomatic recognition for the ROC in the international community are doomed to fail.
In summary, Taiwan is a "country without a government" that is being occupied and run by a "government without a country." As such, it does not fulfill the Montevideo Convention's criteria for statehood. Until the ROC is dissolved and Taiwanese create a new and proper Taiwanese civil government, "Taiwan" can neither be a normal country nor can join the UN.
Taiwan's efforts at "self-determination" should begin with the recognition that US military government jurisdiction over Taiwan is still active. If a consensus on this point (clearly stipulated in Article 4b of the San Francisco Peace Treaty) can be reached, then the members of the US Congress can assume jurisdiction over Taiwan based on the territorial clause of the US Constitution.
Certainly one of the Congress' first acts will be to rectify the name of Taiwan to "Taiwan," and to discard, once and for all, the inappropriate label of "Republic of China" into the dustbin of history.
Roger C.S. Lin
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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