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.
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