Is Taiwan a Possession of The United States?

Behind The Lines
By Dr. Jack Wheeler
Thursday, August 11, 2005

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.

Taiwan has been inhabited by a Malayo-Polynesian aboriginal people for
40,000 years. The Chinese never showed any interest in it nor
attempted to colonize it all the way up to the end of the Ming Dynasty
in 1644 AD. The Portuguese, the first European colonizers in Asia,
made no attempt to do so either, although they named it Formosa
(Beautiful).

It was the Dutch, who had begun colonizing Java and Sumatra and
creating the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the early 1600s,
that established a base there in 1624 and began to import Chinese men
from Fujian across the Formosa Straits as laborers. A Chinese pirate
named Koxinga took over the island in 1661, kicked out the Dutch and
established a pirate kingdom.

In the meantime, over in China, a tribe of nomadic herders similar to
the Mongols called the Manchus had conquered northeastern China,
calling their kingdom Ching (or Qing), "Pure." In 1644, they overthrew
the Ming Dynasty by seizing Beijing, with the last Ming Emperor,
Chongzhen, hanging himself on a tree overlooking the Forbidden City.

The Manchus had to spend the next 17 years consolidating their control
over all of China. After two subsequent decades of raids on their
southern coast, they put an end to Koxinga's pirate kingdom and took
over Taiwan in 1683. At the time there were about 7,000 Han (ethnic
Chinese) on the island.

Some two hundred years later, in 1894, the Ching government of China
got into a war with Japan over control of Korea, and lost. In the
formal Treaty of Shimonoseki signed in April, 1985, the Chinese
government formally recognized the independence of Korea, and legally
ceded Taiwan to Japan. For the next 50 years, Taiwan under
international law was the possession of Japan's.

The Japanese Government's control over Taiwan ceased on August 15,
1945 when it announced its surrender in World War II. The Instrument
of Surrender was signed on the deck of the USS Missouri on September
2, which placed "all Japanese forces wherever situated" under the
command of "the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers," Gen. Douglas
MacArthur.

That day, McArthur formed the United States Military Government (USMG)
with jurisdiction over Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. General Order No. 1
of the USMG included the directive that all Japanese commanders and
forces in Taiwan (called Formosa) "shall surrender to Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek," leader of the recognized legal government of China,
the Republic of China (ROC). These forces then surrendered to ROC
commander Chen Yi on October 25, 1945.

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

This occupation conducted by Chen Yi proved impossibly corrupt and
abusive, resulting in a rebellion by native Taiwanese known as the 228
Incident, as it began on February 28, 1947. Chen Yi's soldiers killed
thousands of Taiwanese and instituted a tyranny called the "White
Terror."

By now, Mao Tse-tung's Communists were waging full scale war against
Chiang Kai-shek's ROC government. They succeeded in taking over China
from April to November, 1949, during which the Generalissimo, several
hundred thousand of his soldiers, and 2 million refugees crossed the
Formosa Strait to Taiwan. Chiang proclaimed that the city of Taipei
was now the temporary capital of the Republic of China, the sole
legitimate government of mainland China.

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.

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).

But - the gargantuan but -- no receiving country is specified in the
treaty. In other words, Japan renounced its sovereignty over Taiwan,
but did not turn over that sovereignty to either the PRC in Beijing or
the ROC in Taiwan. Neither the PRC nor the ROC were invited to the San
Francisco treaty conference, and neither was a signatory to the
treaty.

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."

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. As the
historical and legal facts described here sink in to Capitol Hill,
expect a number of bills to be offered in the upcoming session that
will either legally turn over sovereignty of Taiwan from the U.S. to
the Taipei government, or make it legally explicit that China's claim
on Taiwan is fraudulent.

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.

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