Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) yesterday challenged President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) to declare “two Chinas” and apologize for citing the Cairo Declaration as his party’s main argument that Taiwan is part of China and that the Republic of China (ROC) is the legal government of Taiwan.
“I hope he will courageously say that he is against ‘one China’ and that there are two Chinas in the world,” Lu said. “Ma owes the public an apology if he applauds the Taipei Treaty today, because the 1952 accord supersedes the Cairo Declaration of 1943.”
The 1943 declaration, which Lu said was little more than a press release, followed a meeting between Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), US president Franklin Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill in Cairo, Egypt. The statement outlines the World War II Allies’ contention that, after the Japanese surrender, territory that Japan had “stolen” from China — including Taiwan and Penghu — should be returned to China.
PHOTO: LO PEI-DER, TAIPEI TIMES
Pro-unification groups, including the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), have long claimed that this, and the subsequent Potsdam Declaration of 1945, gave China the right to resume sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu. They argue that the Cairo Declaration is a legal document that establishes the ROC’s claim.
Pro-independence activists, however, cite two other agreements to argue that Taiwan’s international status is undefined.
The San Francisco Peace Treaty, signed in 1951, six years after Japan’s surrender and the end of its half-century rule of Taiwan, states that the Japanese government renounces sovereignty over Taiwan and Penghu, but does not specify to whom that sovereignty was to be transferred.
The Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, better known as the Taipei Treaty, of 1952, affirms the 1951 pact, reiterating that the Japanese government would renounce any claim to Taiwan, Penghu, the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands.
The treaty again does not specify the legal successor government of these territories.
Lu yesterday urged Ma to modify high school history books to indicate that the ROC is not the legal government of Taiwan. If Ma dared to announce “two Chinas,” she said, the ruling and opposition parties could begin negotiating about the nation’s title.
Lu made the remarks in response to a report that Ma is scheduled to attend an unveiling ceremony for several bronze statues at Taipei Guest House today. The statues depict representatives of Japan and the ROC signing the Taipei Treaty on April 28, 1952.
The former vice president said that if Ma attended the opening ceremony today, it was tantamount to recognizing the Taipei Treaty, adding that it superseded the 1943 Cairo Declaration.
Lu said the 1943 treaty returned Taiwan to the ROC, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC) because the PRC was founded in 1949.
She said that, despite the PRC never having exercised power in Taiwan, it continued to lie to the world by arguing that Taiwan is part of its territory.
The Cairo Declaration also predates the creation of the UN, Lu said. Taiwan, a former Japanese colony, should have been managed by the UN after Japan’s surrender, and its people should have been given the opportunity to decide their fate in accordance with the UN charter, she said.
Former Examination Yuan president Yao Chia-wen (姚嘉文) demanded that Academia Historica President Lin Man-houng (林滿紅) step down for claiming that she had “discovered” in the Taipei Treaty that Japan had handed sovereignty over Taiwan to the ROC in 1952.
Yao accused Lin of offering political services to the KMT by distorting history.
Former Judicial Yuan vice president Cheng Chung-mo (城仲模) said that Taiwan was under the rule of the US Military Government after Japan relinquished control over the territory in 1945.
An order the ROC government in Nanjing made in 1946 that Taiwanese were Chinese violated international law and was not made with the consent of Taiwanese, he said.
The ROC government’s military crackdown to suppress the 1947 uprising in Taiwan actually took place on Japanese soil because Taiwan was still a Japanese colony at the time, he said.
The KMT also flaunted international convention to recruit soldiers in Taiwan when the Nationalist troops lost the Chinese civil war and withdrew to Taiwan in 1949, he said.
Li Ming-juinn (李明峻) of the Taiwanese Society of International Law said Taiwanese should have the final say over the country’s future, or they could handle the matter in cooperation with the UN.
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