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TAIPEI: China is intentionally mischaracterising World War Two-era documents to put pressure on and isolate Taiwan given those agreements made no determination of the island’s ultimate political status, the de facto US embassy in Taipei said.
The 80th anniversary of the war’s end has been marked by a bitter dispute between Taipei and Beijing on its broader historical meaning and relevance today.
The Beijing government says documents like the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation support its legal claims of sovereignty over the island, as the wording states Taiwan was to be “restored” to Chinese rule, Taiwan being a Japanese colony at the time.
The Chinese government at the time was the Republic of China, which then in 1949 fled to Taiwan after losing a subsequent civil war with Mao Zedong’s communists.
Republic of China remains Taiwan’s formal name, and its government says no World War Two agreements made any mention of Mao’s People’s Republic of China because it did not exist then, thus Beijing has no right to claim Taiwan now.
“China intentionally mischaracterises World War Two-era documents, including the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation, and the Treaty of San Francisco, to try to support its coercive campaign to subjugate Taiwan,” the American Institute in Taiwan said in an statement emailed to Reuters on Monday.
“Beijing’s narratives are simply false, and none of these documents determined Taiwan’s ultimate political status.”
The San Francisco Peace Treaty was signed by Japan in 1951 renouncing its claims to Taiwan, though the island’s sovereignty is left unresolved in it. Beijing says the treaty is “illegal and invalid” given it was not a party to it.
The United States ended official ties with Taipei in 1979 when it recognized Beijing, but remains the island’s most important international backer.
Washington follows a “one China policy” under which it officially takes no position on Taiwan’s sovereignty and only acknowledges China’s position on the subject.
“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,” added the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto US embassy.
China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Chinese President Xi Jinping on September 3 oversaw a massive military parade in Beijing to mark the war anniversary.
Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung expressed his thanks for the US mission’s statement.
“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 statement.

MANILA: The Philippine president on Monday encouraged the public to express their outrage over massive corruption that has plagued flood-control projects in one of Asia’s most typhoon-prone countries but said street protests should be peaceful.
President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. vowed that an investigation by an independent commission would not spare even his allies in the House of Representatives and the Senate, where several legislators have been identified and accused in televised congressional hearings of pocketing huge kickbacks, along with government engineers and construction companies. Marcos first spoke about the corruption scandal in July in his annual state of the nation speech.
Unlike recent violent protests in Nepal and Indonesia, street rallies against alleged abuses in the Philippines have been smaller and relatively peaceful. Outrage has largely been vented online, including by Catholic church leaders, business executives and retired generals.
A planned protest on Sept. 21 in a pro-democracy shrine in the Manila metropolis near guarded upscale neighborhoods, where some of the corruption suspects live in affluence, is expected to draw a larger crowd. Police forces and troops have been placed on alert.
“If I wasn’t president, I might be out in the streets with them,” Marcos said of anti-corruption protesters.
“Of course they are enraged, of course they are angry, I’m angry,” Marcos added, calling on the protesters to demand accountability. “You let them know your sentiments, you let them know how they hurt you, how they stole from you, shout at them and do everything, demonstrate, just keep it peaceful.”
But Communications Undersecretary Claire Castro said over the weekend that “people who have ill intentions and want to destabilize the government” should not exploit the public’s outrage.
Defense Secretary Gilberto Teodoro, Jr. and military chief of staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. issued a joint statement late Friday rejecting a call for the country’s armed forces to withdraw support from Marcos in response to public outrage over the corruption scandal. They did not elaborate, but underscored that the 160,000-member military was non-partisan, professional and “abides by the constitution through the chain-of-command.”
During a recent rally, a speaker called on the military to end its loyalty to Marcos and called on Filipinos to stage a non-violent “people power” revolt similar to army-backed uprisings that ousted Ferdinand Marcos, the current president’s late father and namesake, in 1986 and Joseph Estrada in 2001.
The House of Representatives and the Senate have been investigating alleged substandard and non-existent flood-control projects in separate televised inquiries. Dozens of legislators, senators, construction companies and public works engineers have been identified and accused of pocketing huge kickbacks that financed lavish lifestyles with mansions, European luxury cars and high-stakes casino gambling in a country still wracked by poverty.
The Philippines has spent an estimated 545 billion pesos ($9.6 billion) for thousands of flood mitigation projects in the last three years alone. The projects were under government review to determine which ones are substandard or non-existent, as Marcos said he found during recent inspections in some flood-prone areas, including in Bulacan, a densely populated province north of Manila.