<$BlogRSDUrl$>

"Pay close attention to that man behind the curtain!"

Monday, September 22, 2008

Jerome Keating discusses the Cairo Declaration

Time to acknowledge that Taiwan is Taiwan

With the 65th anniversary of the Cairo Declaration coming up in just a couple of months (December 1, 2008), Jerome Keating takes a look back at some of the details of that infamous non-binding document. Here's a bit from near the conclusion:
[...] The actual Treaty of San Francisco (1952) never stated who Japan should give Taiwan to. A faint ray of hope appears when you force the United States government into a corner and ask what the real status of Taiwan is right now; the answer is that it is still "undecided." Even the dodgy "one China" mantra that the US State Department constantly trots out simply means that the US acknowledges that the PRC government thinks by its own twisted logic that it owns Taiwan. But that mantra leaves unsaid that the official US position is that Taiwan's fate is undecided.

Undecided? Even that wording annoys. Isn't it time then to end this circuitous rhetoric? Here we are some sixty-three years after the end of World War II, more than a half of a century and the fate of twenty-three million people in a thriving, hard won democracy is still called undecided? Ironically after that war, the United Nations charter states that all people have the right to self-determination. All that is, except the twenty-three million of the thriving democracy of Taiwan.
Go read the whole thing for full effect.

FURTHER READING:
* The Cairo Declaration (via the Taiwan Documents Project)
* The Treaty of Peace with Japan, AKA the San Francisco Peace Treaty or the Treaty of San Francisco, (also via the Taiwan Documents Project)
* The Treaty of Shimonoseki, in which pre-PRC/pre-ROC China gave up Formosa (Taiwan) "in perpetuity and full sovereignty" (also via the Taiwan Documents Project)
* On one of my anti-meme pages, I discuss the situation of pre-PRC, pre-ROC, non-Han control of merely a portion of Taiwan and how that relates to the falsehood about the two entities which supposedly "split in 1949."
* The Taiwan Nation web site shows readers how Winston Churchill -- one of the signatories CORRECTION: issuers of the Cairo Declaration -- subsequently said that the document "contains merely a statement of common purpose" and that "the question of [Formosa's] future sovereignty was left undetermined by the Japanese peace treaty."
* 1874 map of Taiwan (Formosa) with "Chinese Boundary" visible (from the archives of Reed College, Portland, Oregon).
* 1894 map of Taiwan (Formosa) with "Limite de domination chinoise" (French for "Limit of Chinese rule") visible (also via Reed College).
Items (some insular) in the stream of consciousness: , , , , ,

Cross-posted at Taiwan Matters!

Labels: , , , , ,

Posted at 9:27 PM by: [Permalink]
eXTReMe Tracker
This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?