The US claims that China uses “false” accounts of World War Two to exert pressure on Taiwan
The official U.S. embassy in Taipei said that China is deliberately misrepresenting papers from World War II in order to put pressure on and isolate Taiwan. These documents did not decide the island’s final political status, the embassy said.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, and Taipei and Beijing are in a heated argument about what it means historically and how it applies to today.
Beijing says that papers like the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation back up its legal claims of authority over the island. These papers call for Taiwan to be “restored” to Chinese rule at a time when it was a Japanese colony.
At the time, China’s government was called the Republic of China. In 1949, after losing a civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists, it fled to Taiwan.
Taiwan’s official name is still the Republic of China, and the island’s government says that Mao’s People’s Republic of China was not mentioned in any deals during World War II because it did not exist at the time. This means that Beijing has no right to claim Taiwan now.
China deliberately misinterprets documents from World War II, such as the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation, and the Treaty of San Francisco, to back its campaign to force Taiwan to submit, the American Institute in Taiwan said in a statement on Monday.
The de facto U.S. embassy told Reuters in an email that Beijing’s stories are not true and that these papers did not decide Taiwan’s final political status.
Japan gave up its rights to Taiwan when it signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1951, but the treaty doesn’t say anything about the island’s sovereignty. China says the pact is “illegal and invalid” because it wasn’t signed by China.
There was “strong dissatisfaction” in China’s foreign ministry over Monday’s words, which they said were misleading.
“Many legally binding documents, like the Cairo Declaration and the Japanese surrender document, make it clear that China controls Taiwan and what its status is,” Lin Jian, a spokesman for the ministry, said in Beijing.
When the US recognized Beijing in 1979, it cut off official ties with Taipei. However, the US is still the island’s biggest foreign supporter.
“One China policy” means that Washington publicly doesn’t have an opinion on Taiwan’s sovereignty and only agrees with China that it does.
“False legal narratives are part of Beijing’s broader campaign to try to isolate Taiwan from the international community and constrain the sovereign choices of other countries regarding their interactions with Taiwan,” said the American Institute in Taiwan.
Lin Chia-lung, the foreign minister of Taiwan, thanked the U.S. mission for its remark.
“Our country and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other, and the People’s Republic of China has no right to represent Taiwan in the international community,” Lin said in a tweet.
To mark the anniversary of the war, on September 3, Chinese President Xi Jinping led a huge military show in Beijing.
