An Anxious Nation

The obscured significance of October on Taiwan and how the United Nations and the PRC created international turmoil in East Asia

Taiwan National Day observances, which take place each year on October 10, inevitably prompt reconsiderations of the Republic of China’s (ROC) status as a country and its exclusion from the United Nations. Articles and editorials concerning these two issues appeared in the Taiwanese press again this year, particularly after Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) visit to the US in August and in the wake of a parade the following month in New York during the UN General Assembly where a group of pro-independence-minded ROC legislators joined with overseas Taiwanese in calling for Taiwan’s admission to the UN.

Unfortunately, President Tsai’s long-standing sentiment — We don’t have to declare ourselves independent because we are already independent and call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan — does nothing to support the Taiwanese cause for UN membership. Likewise, Vice President Lai’s recent anti-declaration-of-independence declaration, “Taiwan is already a sovereign independent country called the Republic of China,” thwarts the quest for his country’s UN recognition.

These calculated national policy masquerades are supposed to be strategically ambiguous to provide a stabilizing support for the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. Nevertheless, a telling paradoxical doublespeak afflicts their political rhetoric, concealing while exposing an anxious nation dreaming of its identity. For the real Taiwan is a ghostly presence begging for visibility but eternally obscured by the geopolitical situation in which its host must play a duplicitous role. Hence, President Tsai’s contrived slogan, “We don’t have to declare ourselves independent because we are already independent,” sounds like a line from an Ionesco play, its second clause absurdly declaring the very thing its first clause claims to refute. While she may not credit her media utterances as formal proclamations, the President knows the world interprets everything she says as though she were establishing edicts. Likewise, when the likely next president, Vice President Lai says, “Taiwan is called the ROC,” he is absurdly asserting that one country can have two contradictory names, each one seeming to prove the existence of the other even though they connote conflicting national identities. Not to mention that only a handful of nations acknowledges the independence of the country by either name.

Even in the ROC, the opposition Nationalist party (KMT), still nominally led by former President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), refuses to support the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government’s use of the name Taiwan over the ROC, viewing it as a plot to curry political favor with the United States by capitalizing on Taiwan’s success as a democracy over the past 30 years. This not-so-subtle appellation shift commenced in 2021 when the government began issuing a redesigned passport. The new cover significantly diminishes the words “Republic of China” by encasing them in an embossed insignia, while a magnified “Taiwan” looms over the lower half of the cover. Likewise, in 2023 former President Ma accused the DPP government of using the designation “Taiwan National Day” to advocate for the country’s independence, potentially destabilizing cross-strait relations. The truth of his interpretation may appear obvious to a like-minded percentage of the citizenry, particularly in the context of present-day international tensions. But such concerns are broader than what the government claims is merely an English representation of Taiwan’s National Day celebration, which is also true, albeit in a much narrower context.

That said, the Taiwanese voting majority together with their allied silent majority tend to be paradoxically-oriented toward supporting both independence and the status quo. Thus, they back the party that moves things sluggishly forward in neutral rather than one that jolts the country forward by trying to shove things into reverse or make sharp turns to the right. For example, both the 1990 Wild Lily student movement demanding democracy for Taiwan and the more recent 2014 Sunflower Student Movement protesting the KMT’s move to undermine that democracy by inextricably linking Taiwan’s independent economy with China’s ultimately repressive one exposed how the KMT’s strong-arm tactics have unwittingly triggered progressive forward lurches into more steady currents of leadership, such as the one presently provided by the DPP.

Furthermore, in that sense, the present government is ironically more traditionally Confucian than the KMT, the so-called status quo being a modern benign iteration of wu wei, 無為, an ancient Chinese style of governing that ostensibly lets innocuity preside while subliminally preventing unmanageable events such as wars of aggression from interfering with its long-term goals. General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stillwell characterized Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership during WWII as a perfidious iteration of wu wei, viewing his obdurate nominal compliance with US command in China as indicative of Chiang’s long-term strategy of maintaining his Nationalist forces for the resumption of his fight against the Soviet backed Chinese communists once the Americans defeated the Japanese for him.

That said, the most radical political voices in Taiwan today are neither Confucian nor militant. Rather they are the intelligentsia, those who believe that only revising or replacing the ROC constitution with one that rids the country of its colonial ROC designation altogether will empower a neoteric incarnation of Taiwan’s national identity. Once established, this newly created Taiwan should prompt its admission to the UN, which ghosted its antecedent, the ROC, over 50 years ago.

In 1971, the UN General Assembly adopted resolution 2758, ousting the ROC from its founding membership while establishing “the restoration of the lawful rights of the People’s Republic of China” and deciding “to restore all its rights” and “recognize the representatives of its Government [the National People’s Congress] as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-Shek….”

Naturally, the substance of the resolution angered the ROC delegation. However, another overlooked yet particularly galling aspect of it was the UN’s premeditated decision to adopt it on October 25, which is Retrocession Day in Taiwan. Formerly a public holiday, October 25 remains a day of national observance in the ROC, commemorating the restoration of Taiwan from Japan back to China (the ROC) in 1945. Thus, resolution 2758’s use of coded language about “the restoration” of the PRC’s lawful rights and the decision “to restore” those rights infuriated the ROC, not only because the PRC never had any rights “to restore” but also because using such language and adopting the resolution on Retrocession Day implicitly invalidated of the historic restoration of Taiwan to the ROC, effectively handing it over to the PRC, which has never had any claim over Taiwan.

At the same time, however, neither did the ROC have any right to claim sovereignty over Taiwan at the end of WWII. What the ROC military labeled as a “retrocession” on October 25 was really its military occupation of Taiwan, which lasted for decades. That said, in a way the ROC has remained consistent with the aims of its founder Dr. Sun Yat-sen in that it eventually evolved into the democratic country that exists today, a development the PRC had not counted on back in 1971.

In addition to securing its place in the UN, the PRC’s other covert intention on October 25 of that year was to strike a death blow to the ROC by orchestrating the theft of its sovereignty over Taiwan. Instead of beating it on the battlefield, the PRC successfully out-maneuvered the ROC on the diplomatic front by duping the UN into aiding and abetting its hypocritical political machinations. Leaving the ROC with no internationally acknowledged territory or rightful citizenry to represent created the existential predicament that it has been confronting since its expulsion from the UN.

That said, the language of resolution 2758 exposes it as little more than inane nonsense, which ultimately undermines its legitimacy and, thereby, renders it null and void. For while it “restored” the PRC’s right to UN membership by recognizing “the representatives of its government,” it expelled “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石),” saying nothing about the ROC government. Since UN delegations only represent their country’s governments and not their leaders, the resolution really expelled no one, just as it did not restore the PRC’s rights to the representatives of Mao Tse-tung (毛澤東).

Despite the absurdity of not using the words the representatives of the government of the Republic of China, the resolution’s phrasing still had a chilling effect, the repercussions of which continue to resonate in the world today. Apart from its explicit decision about the PRC’s rights being restored, the wording of resolution 2758 also and more importantly did the PRC the singular favor of facilitating the official derecognition of the ROC as a country, which is precisely why the resolution expels “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek.” By so doing, the UN deletes the existence of the ROC and with it the notion of two Chinas. As a result, very few countries around the world today refer to Taiwan as the Republic of China. Most refer to it as “Taiwan, Province of China,” except the Olympic Games, which with the cowardice endemic to the administration of that organization and in deference to the PRC, absurdly refers to the ROC as Chinese Taipei.

Today, the only organization that fervently venerates the name the Republic of China is the opposition Nationalist Party (KMT) in the ROC. That is not to say that the KMT wants Taiwan to be a province of China, but neither does it support estranging the PRC by reorienting Taiwan toward the West. In fact, the KMT generates support from Taiwan’s shrinking conservative population by appealing to their familial nostalgia for China, which the name “ROC” arouses. The PRC uses the same sort of affective propaganda to win over the patriotic hearts of its general population, some of whom are moved to tears over what they perceive as the West’s alienation of their Taiwanese brothers and sisters across the Strait.

Thus, the passage of resolution 2758 achieved three clear goals for the PRC: it displaced the ROC to make way for the PRC’s admission to the UN, it delegitimized the ROC by insuring the wording of the resolution did not recognize or mention the ROC by name, and it restored to the PRC all the rights and territories that the ROC had formerly claimed as its own, including by implication Taiwan. These three achievements clearly demonstrate that the PRC’s overriding purpose in joining the UN was the annihilation of the ROC, and it gained support in that quest from the other Communist Bloc countries that relished the thought of seizing the ROC’s seat on the Security Council.

What other support the PRC had from the Western and Non-aligned Blocs grew out of their economic advisors’ prescient predictions that a lot of money could be made by fostering the development of a benign China, which Nixon’s visit to the Middle Kingdom four months later seemed to presage. At the time, the PRC appeared to have the potential to become an enormously productive manufacturing plantation worked by a cheap almost limitless force of obedient wage slaves laboring away under the mind-numbing sway of Maoist rhetorical rubbish. In the meantime, as historians at the time were arguing, Western capitalist enterprise had always savored the role slavery could play in the accumulation of wealth. Those economic prognostications eventually did come true six years hence, after Deng Xiaoping’s (邓小平) visit with President Carter.

Of lesser importance to the PRC was the formality of it membership in the UN. Its covert desire was merely for the international recognition and legitimacy that the trappings of UN membership would bring it. The PRC government’s subsequent belligerent attitude vis-à-vis the charter of the United Nations unmasks its international posturing as nothing but a duplicitous simulation of “faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.”

Moreover, by expelling the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek, the UN defiled its own charter by erasing the authentic contributions the ROC made to furthering the ideals of the UN from its earliest stages. For example, Dr. Peng Chung Chang of the ROC served as the Vice-Chairman of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights and was much admired by the commission’s director, the former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. Dr. Peng was a remarkable intellectual with wide ranging humanitarian and philosophical interests. In his role as Vice Chairman, Chang made vital contributions to the composition of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights. By bringing elements of Confucianism into the UDHR, Chang brought relevance to that document for much of Asia, especially China. And yet, the PRC does not accept the UDHR, claiming instead a farcical concept of “human rights with Chinese characteristics,” exposing its racist Han haughtiness, a brand of Chinese narcissism that believes itself to be somehow superior to the universality of the rest of humanity. Naturally, the UN will never undercut its own simulated preeminence by annulling resolution 2758, no matter how egregiously the PRC violates any of the UN’s conventions.

One further repercussion of resolution 2758 was the Sino-Japanese Joint Communique of 1972, which normalized Japan’s diplomatic relations with the PRC. The effect of that decision was the implicit derecognition by Japan, although not the ROC, of the 1952 Treaty of Taipei, a version of the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco that formally ended WWII hostilities. Although the Republic of China had been one of the four main Allied Powers to which the Treaty of San Francisco applied, it had been excluded from signing that treaty due to an argument between the US and UK over which Chinese government — the ROC or the PRC — the treaty should recognize. The US favored the ROC while the UK favored the PRC. That same disagreement persisted for two decades, influencing the debate over resolution 2758. The UK voted in favor of it while both the US and Japan voted against it. Nevertheless, Japan issued the Sino-Japanese Joint Communique within a year of resolution 2758 and in so doing implicitly recognized the PRC’s claim on its, Japan’s former colonial possession, Taiwan. That said, like the US, Japan has maintained close ties with the ROC and despite the Joint Communique paradoxically does not support China’s territorial claim over Taiwan nor does it have much stomach for the PRC’s intimidating tactics throughout the Strait and the South China Sea.

Despite the wary, some might say timid disposition of the ROC government, which prefers the status quo and peace as opposed to risking immediate war by moving toward independence, a progressive reinterpretation of the situation could present a path forward for the island of Taiwan, albeit not as Taiwan or the ROC but under a completely different name. The idea is not as radical as it sounds, since neither Taiwan nor the ROC has ever been the true name of the entity presently known as Taiwan. Even during its first short-lived attempt at independence back in 1895, as a rebellion against Japanese rule, it had called itself the Republic of Formosa. Moreover, throughout the 20th century until the end of World War II, the island was known in English as Formosa. Only after Retrocession Day in 1945, when the Chinese occupied the island, did the rest of the world begin formally referring to it as Taiwan.

By 1947, well before Chiang’s Nationalist forces retreated to the island, the ROC had established it as Taiwan Province with a Provincial Government initially in Taipei and then in Zhongxing New Village in Nantou County. The present ROC government finally abolished the Taiwan Provincial Government in 2018 and since that time has sought to elevate the name Taiwan to the level of synonymy with ROC. Except that the ROC government, like that of Imperial Japan before it, has never been anything other than a colonial authority. After 1949, the ROC became a Chinese government in exile on Taiwan, but it lost even that designation when UN resolution 2758 adopted the PRC’s One China principle, which ipso facto converted Taiwan into a Province of the PRC. It was an absurd case of stealing something — Taiwan — from somebody — the ROC — who did not have any right to it in the first place. Therefore, creating a new name for the non-existent country of Taiwan is not really a case of changing its name but of originating one that represents the people who now call the island home.

Taking its geography as a starting point, the island now known as Taiwan lies on the east side of the strait that underscores its strategic significance. Thus, a logical name for this country is The Republic of the Strait Islands, the RSI. The national boundaries, along with everything else about the place, would remain as they are presently, including the country’s multicultural heritage as well as its Bilingual 2030 aspiration. Only the place-names would change, meaning the people who live in the RSI would be known as Strait Islanders. “Taiwan” could become Tayouan, linguistically acknowledging the country’s indigenous roots. The “Taiwan” Strait would be renamed as the Asian Continental Strait, an international waterway 86 to 136 kilometers wide separating the Asian mainland from the Republic of the Strait Islands and subject to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which among other provisions would secure both the PRC and the RSI rights extending approximately 22 kilometers from their coastlines.

Of course, the PRC would vehemently object to such an arrangement, since it would mean relinquishing their bogus territorial claims to the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan Island. Such a concession would defeat China’s whole purpose in supplanting the ROC from the UN in the first place. In fact, the whole premise of the UN is antithetical to the CCP’s world-view. So the PRC’s plan from the start was only ever to control the Taiwan Strait, which it cannot do if the world recognizes Taiwan by whatever name as an independent state.

Nevertheless, assuming the adoption of a plan to assume a new name succeeded in the ROC’s Executive Yuan, it would necessarily include a recognition of the PRC’s one China principle, which would allow the newly established RSI to circumvent the bogus resolution 2758 and apply for membership to the UN. However, at that point the RSI would also have to confront yet another unfortunate hurdle that presents a serious impediment to its UN membership, one for which the ROC alone bears responsibility but that it has chosen to dodge for nearly 75 years.

On October 10, 1925, to coincide with that year’s National Day celebrations, the ROC opened the National Palace Museum in Beijing, thereby making national treasures of the many dynastic relics, books, and cultural antiquities then festooning the rooms of the Forbidden City. For the first time after the fall of China’s long dynastic domination, the people were allowed to view these national Chinese cultural treasures. In 1933, to protect the museum’s priceless collection from the disaster of its falling into the hands of the invading forces of the Japanese Imperial Army, the Nationalist government undertook the monumental task of moving it all to the south, where it remained throughout not only World War II but also the Chinese Civil War. Finally, in 1948–49, as the losing Nationalist forces were evacuating China for Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek directed the looting of 3000 crates containing over 600,000 of the National Palace Museum’s most valued antiquities. He transported these purloined relics to Taiwan instead of sending them back to Beijing along with the other 6000 crates of antiquities he did return.

Naturally, the PRC wants to have Chiang Kai-shek’s cache of pilfered antiquities returned to the Palace Museum in Beijing, and doing so could be an excellent way for the ROC to strengthen and sustain the status quo across the Strait. However, the ROC long ago invented its own cultural entitlement to the stolen antiquities, which in a textbook example of authoritarian gaslighting it regards as “inherited” rather than stolen. Even the architecture of the National Palace Museum in Taipei is a fine example of totalitarian kitsch meant to induce an ersatz nostalgia for the Forbidden City in Beijing. Moreover, few, if any politicians in the ROC have ever advocated for the return of the relics to China. On the other hand, no one in the ROC has dared to make any proprietary claims to the relics either. Doing so could be interpreted by the PRC as a bellicose provocation, implicitly asserting that not only is Taiwan an inseparable part of China but also, as in former days, the ROC is the true government of China and intends to keep the artifacts until it retakes the mainland, either diplomatically or by force if necessary.

Furthermore, with respect to its suitability as member of the UN, keeping the looted antiquities puts the ROC, or whatever it chooses to call itself, in direct contravention of several multilateral UN-sponsored treaties, including the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, the First Protocol of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, the 1972 UNESCO Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects.

According to these UNESCO conventions, is it unlawful for the ROC not only to retain the stolen antiquities but also to fail to protect them from destruction by either ill trained personnel or inadequate shelter. Unfortunately, the ROC is failing to meet both responsibilities. For example, several of the National Palace Museum’s employees have not completed the necessary professional training to work with cultural antiquities. Their incompetence, together with the mishandling or improper storage of the relics has resulted in several of them recently being broken.

In addition, sheltering the Palace relics in places that make them either vulnerable to attack or a target in the event of war is a violation of the UNESCO conventions. Therefore, the ROC should immediately remove all the antiquities from the National Palace Museum locations and hide them in a safe place until the PRC rescinds its threat to take Taiwan by force, which Xi Jinping (習近平) has warned would “bring profound disaster to Taiwan.” After all, the government’s expenditures bolstering Taiwan’s military readiness are a testament to its belief that Xi’s threats are genuine. Therefore, the government’s failure to provide adequate expenditures to maintain and safeguard the relics housed in the National Palace Museums suggests that it may not sincerely believe the PRC will risk starting a conflict with the West over Taiwan. Which means the ROC is only building up its military as a deterrent to Xi’s threats of aggression that it does not believe will actually come to pass.

That aside, the ROC cannot afford to sacrifice its position on the high moral ground, which represents another powerful potentially disarming form of deterrence that returning the stolen Chinese antiquities to Beijing would reinforce. Moreover, if the ROC would simply return the antiquities as part of its plan to become The Republic of the Strait Islands, then the PRC would have to recognize the RSI, which would enable it (the RSI) to apply for UN membership. On the other hand, that being the price, the PRC might ironically block the return of their own cultural relics. Although doing that would still let the RSI off the hook and allow it both to keep the antiquities and apply to the UN without the artifacts standing in the way.

Technically, of course, the antiquities will always belong to the Palace Museum in Beijing and not the ROC. However, why should the ROC want to keep all those “inherited” cultural relics and build a faux Forbidden City to show them off in the middle of its capital, Taipei, unless it is to project to the roughly 5 million international tourists expected to visit the Museum each year that the ROC represents the real China and that the CCP is nothing but a coven of communist interlopers.

One can understand Chiang’s building the museum back in the early 1960s. After all, he did believe the ROC represented the real and only legitimate China. Not to mention that he started the National Palace Museum on National Day back in 1925 and later hijacked its prize possessions like POWs to a prison vault in Taichung, Taiwan. But now, 75 years after their arrival in Taiwan, the relics of the Forbidden City have become an expensive albatross, strangling the island’s progress toward a more authentic identity.

Thus, the long-obscured ghostly reality of the ROC’s collection of stolen, not inherited artifacts goes to the heart of the anxious nation’s two most pressing predicaments, its lack of statehood and its exclusion from the United Nations. Thus, the ROC can neither assert its independence nor expect an invitation to join the UN so long as it clings to the 600,000 antiquities and cultural artifacts that Ching Kai-shek looted from the Forbidden City of another country, namely, the one China that Taiwan is and wants no part of.