IS TAIWAN A POSSESSION OF THE UNITED STATES?

Behind The Lines
By Dr. Jack Wheeler

(Available by paid subscription only.)

Communist China, the People’s Republic of China or PRC, never tires of denouncing Taiwan as a “renegade province” that belongs to it, and bitterly complaining that any attempt by any country anywhere in the world to treat Taiwan as a sovereign independent nation is a gross interference in China’s “internal affairs.”

This claim is about to be publicly exposed as baseless – for it turns out that as a matter of international law, Taiwan is legally an overseas possession of the United States of America."

THE FACTS:
1. In 1894, the Ching government of China got into a war with Japan over control of Korea, and lost.

2. In the formal Treaty of Shimonoseki signed in April, 1895, the Chinese government formally recognized the independence of Korea, and legally ceded Taiwan to Japan.

3. For the next 50 years, Taiwan under international law was the possession of Japan’s.

4. The Japanese Government’s control over Taiwan ceased on August 15, 1945 when it announced its surrender in World War II."

5. But the Instrument of Surrender was an armistice, not a formal peace treaty. Japan had not ceded Taiwan to the ROC.

6. The legal authority in Taiwan remained the United States Military Government, which had delegated – delegated, not relinquished – the military occupation of Taiwan to the ROC.

7. The Mao Tse-tung’s Communists waged full scale war against Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC government and succeeded in taking over China from April to November, 1949.

8. Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed that the city of Taipei was now the temporary capital of the Republic of China, the sole legitimate government of mainland China.

9. It may have been the legitimate capital of China, but not of Taiwan, because the ROC was not the legitimate government of Taiwan – the USMG was.

10. Japan did not sign a formal peace treaty until September 8, 1951. Known as the Treaty of San Francisco, Article 2(b) states:“Japan renounces all right, title and claim to Formosa and the Pescadores” (islands in the Formosa Straits).

11. No receiving country is specified in the treaty.

12. Japan renounced its sovereignty over Taiwan, but did not turn over that sovereignty to either the PRC in Beijing or the ROC in Taiwan.

13. Neither the PRC nor the ROC were invited to the San Francisco treaty conference, and neither was a signatory to the treaty.

14. This means that the USMG remained the sovereign legal authority in Taiwan. Article 4(b) of the treaty states this in recognizing the authority of “the United States Military Government in any of the areas referred to in Articles 2 and 3,” as does Article 23(a) recognizing “the United States of America as the principal occupying Power.”

15. This treaty is still in effect.

In the opinion of a number of scholars of international law, Taiwan is neither a province of China over which the PRC has legitimate sovereignty, nor is Taiwan a sovereign state of itself. It is, rather, an overseas territory of the U.S.

The practical bottom line to this is that the Communist PRC government of China has no claim to Taiwan under international law. Further, as Taiwan is a U.S. territorial possession, the United States government is legally obliged to defend it.

This can only be changed by the United States Congress. There’s going to be a hot debate in Congress as it realizes it’s been handed a sizzling hot potato. America owns Taiwan. What is it going to do with it?"