Contents

1.Introduction
2.Cairo Declaration brings misfortunes to Taiwan
3.Taiwan's tragedy begins with occupation by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops
4.February 28 Incident
5.White Terror
6.Korean War and U.S. "containment policy" against China
7.Prison without bars
8.Taiwan independence movement
9.Ideal chance to resolve the Taiwan question lost
10.United Nations admits Taiwan's undetermined legal status
11.Shanghai Communique no longer valid
12.Establishment of U.S.- China diplomatic relations and the Taiwan Relations Act
13.Kuomintang's dictatorship overturned despite repeated political persecutions
14.Taiwan democratizes
15.Mao Zedong's nation-founding spirit and Taiwan
16.America's founding principle diametrically opposed to Chinese creed of monolithic empire
17.Taiwan's national survival in jeopardy

1. Introduction

U.S. President George W. Bush, in his Jan. 20 second inaugural address, appealed to the whole world:

"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

"All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will not ignore oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Using the words "freedom" and "liberty" as many as a total 42 times, President Bush called on peoples living in tyranny to promote democratic movements and pledged that the U.S. is on the side of people struggling for the cause of freedom and liberty.

The president, in his Feb. 2 State of the Union Message to Congress, also encouraged people tormented by despotic terrorism to fight for freedom, emphasizing "The most important of freedoms is the freedom from fear."

His "speech on freedom" is persuasive because it is backed by reality. President Bush toppled the dictatorial regimes of Afghanistan and Iraq by using force, and in both countries, democratic elections were held with U.S. backing. In the National Assembly elections in Iraq in particular, 58 percent of eligible voters showed their steadfast determination to fight for peace and cast their ballots without yielding to terrorist threats. These facts have emboldened people suffering under dictatorial rule, and in the Middle East, struggles for democratization have intensified to the extent that they are being called the "domino phenomenon of democratization." And democratic movements are now spreading to many parts of the world.

In such circumstances, what is odd is that in Taiwan, the democratization movement is facing a serious predicament, its acceleration deterred under Washington's pressure.

After the end of World War II, the Republic of China (the Kuomintang government), as one of the victorious Allies, occupied Taiwan. Nationalist China's regime led by absolute dictator Chiang Kai-shek treated Taiwan as a spoil of war, usurping its riches and ruling the islanders with terrorism. The Chiang government forced the use of the Chinese (Mandarin) language on the Taiwanese populace, but in those days there were scarcely any islanders with a good command of the Chinese language, which is as different from the island's native tongue as English is from German. In other words, the Taiwanese were even stripped of their own language.

Dictatorial rule by Chiang and his son, Chiang Ching-kuo, lasted as long as 42 years. After the demise of Chiang Ching-kuo from illness in 1998, the democratization of Taiwan was pushed ahead under the leadership of President Lee Teng-hui, himself a native islander, and Taiwan thus became a free society. The freedom of the island is yet to be endorsed by law, however. This is because even now, the Chinese Republic's constitution is in effect.

Initially, this constitution was proclaimed on the mainland by the Chinese in 1947 to apply to all of China, already under Communist control, and Mongolia, but not to Taiwan, which the Republic of China was occupying as its last hold out. Such a strange constitution is found nowhere else but in Taiwan. The Taiwanese, with a foreign constitution imposed forcibly on them without any legal basis, are now vigorously campaigning island-wide to have their own constitution.

A democracy is a political system for the people to govern themselves by, and it is a basic principle of a democracy to faithfully abide by the laws either directly enacted by the people or through elected representatives. The democratization of Taiwan cannot be fully accomplished on a legal basis unless the Taiwanese people establish a constitution of their own. Despite all this, the U.S. government is opposed to Taiwan having such a constitution. Taiwan's people, who are always under Beijing's threat of force, cannot help but to react sensitively to every move Washington makes because they are fully aware of the indispensability of U.S. collaboration to the defense of their island. It is such U.S. opposition to Taiwan establishing a new constitution that has thrown the island into political limbo.

Washington's position is that given Beijing's strong objections, it is undesirable that Taiwan should have a constitution of its own since it will only serve to escalate cross-strait tensions. The Chinese leaders' stance against the establishment of a Taiwanese constitution stems from the Beijing's fear of losing the legal base on which to justify their conquest of the island in the event Taiwan scraps its present Chinese constitution. Viewed from the standpoint of international law, Beijing's insistence that Taiwan is a Chinese territory is utterly groundless. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party overturned the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kai-shek and created the People's Republic of China instead. Beijing, for its part, claims that the People's Republic of China at that time took over all the rights that had been held by the Republic of China, and such a claim has been widely accepted in the international community. This means that any entity professing to be the Republic of China is a rebellious entity and
that the People's Republic of China has the right to suppress such an entity. Beijing aims to restrict Taiwan to its present constitution until the People's Republic of China builds up military strength sufficient enough to conquer the island. Viewed in this context, Washington's present policy on Taiwan is tantamount to retaining the potential for a future conflict.

The sole solution of the Taiwan problem is to incorporate Taiwan into the international security system by establishing a Taiwanese constitution that has nothing to do with the mainland and that restricts Taiwan's territory to the island proper and its offshore islands, welcoming Taiwan, like any other nation, to be a member of the international community. To this end, a change in Washington's Taiwan policy is an absolute must.

The Bush Administration, which clamors for global democratization, has followed a policy of preventing the legal democratization of Taiwan, retaining, instead, the potential for a future conflict. This is probably because Washington does not fully understand the history of Taiwan and where it actually stands now. The Taiwan problem originally presented itself when the U.S. told the Kuomintang government to occupy the island at the time of the termination of World War II. Had Washington had sufficient knowledge of Taiwan's history and reality, it would never have committed a blunder like this. The people of Taiwan are not skeptical about President Bush's words "When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." Rather, they sincerely hope that the U.S. government will switch to a correct Taiwan policy based on the history of the island and the reality it has faced.

2. Cairo Declaration brings misfortunes to Taiwan

Taiwan, situated between the Japanese archipelago and the Philippines in the Western Pacific, is in no way a tiny island.

It covers 36,000 square kilometers in area, about half the size of the Netherlands and Belgium combined, but has a population of 23 million, far larger than that of the 16 million in the Netherlands or the 10 million in Belgium. Taiwan had been inhabited by aborigines of Malayan and Polynesian descents 10,000 years or more ago, but they never formed a state of their own. Divided by a central mountain range that runs from north to south with a chain of high peaks towering over 3,000 meters above sea level, Taiwan in ancient times did not have anything that could be called a road. So the aborigines, grouped into 10-odd separate tribes, built hamlets here and there. Taiwan was a land not fit for the formation of towns because the aboriginal tribes, though equally Malayan and Polynesian by ancestry, spoke different languages and also because a wide variety of epidemics, including malaria and scarlet fever, were rampant throughout the island. The aboriginal population was short of 100,000, with all the tribes put together. This was presumably why a state had not been formed on the island in the remote past.

Taiwan emerged in world history after the Age of Discovery had arrived, when Europeans began to be seen in Southeast Asia and East Asia. In 1622, the Dutch occupied the Pescadores, a territory of the Ming dynasty of China, and a war ensued. In 1624, the Ming agreed to a cease-fire with the Dutch, agreeing to the condition not to oppose the Dutch occupation of Taiwan. As a result, the Dutch withdrew from the Pescadores and seized, instead, the southern region of Taiwan. Though the region was only a part of Taiwan, this was the first time that Taiwan had come directly under the sway of a state. Thereafter, the Spanish occupied the northern part of Taiwan, but they were driven out by the Dutch.

In 1644, the Manchus of the Qing dynasty overthrew the Ming after invading China, crossing the Great Wall of China. In 1661, Zheng Chengg?ng (Cheng Ch'eng-kung), a Ming warrior, who had continued resisting the Qing even after the downfall of the Ming dynasty, led his troops into Taiwan, and the Dutch who surrendered withdrew from the island. The following year, Zheng died at the young age of 39 and was succeeded by his son, Zheng Jing, who had remained resistant to the Qing. In 1679, the Qing proposed a truce to Zheng Jing, saying, "Taiwan is not a Chinese territory. It's the land you have developed. If you discontinue resisting our state, and stay on in Taiwan, we are ready to call off hostilities." Zheng rejected the Qing's overture, however, and in 1681, he died in a battled against the Qing, who then occupied Taiwan. At first in the Qing, an opinion favoring the abandonment of Taiwan had prevailed. The Manchus were not interested in the island, girdled on all sides by the sea. But a consensus was reached that if Taiwan were abandoned, it might be reoccupied by the Europeans or could become the den of pirates; hence, the Qing incorporated Taiwan into its territory. Yet this did not enhance the Qing's interest in Taiwan. Simply stationing officials and troops on the island, the Qing banned the migration of mainlanders to Taiwan and kept calling Taiwan contemptuously a "land outside the influence of dynastic culture" until the closing years of the Qing dynasty. Nevertheless, famine-stricken destitute mainland peasants, males mostly, illegally crossed to Taiwan, where they married aboriginal women and had offspring.

In 1894, the first Sino-Japanese War broke out. As a result of the conclusion of a peace treaty the following year, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands were ceded to Japan. In part because Taiwan was the first colony Japan had ever acquired, the Japanese applied themselves hard to the development of the island, determined to make it a model colony in the world. First, efforts were made to exterminate epidemics through rigid health administration and, at the same time, to encourage universal education, to improve infrastructure and to build industry. Taiwan had a population of an estimated 500,000 at the time it became a part of Japan, but the population swelled to about 6 million during the 50-years of Japanese rule.

In 1945 Japan was defeated in World War II and surrendered to the Allies. On Sept. 2 of that year, when Japan signed the instruments of surrender, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, issued Directive Number 1. This directive indicated to which of the Allies the Japanese troops deployed in various parts of Asia should surrender. The occupation of Japan by the Americans, occupation of Manchuria by the Soviets and occupation of Taiwan by the Chinese were wholly in accordance with this SCAP directive. The reason that Chiang Kai-shek was ordered to take Taiwan was presumably because a statement, released following the 1943 Cairo Conference of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek, said: "It is the purpose of the Three Great Allies that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China." However, the U.S. president and the British prime minister apparently had no authority to deal with Taiwan and Pescadores as such because these islands belonged to neither the U.S. nor Britain. It is a principle of international law that any territorial change resulting from war be effected by the conclusion of a peace treaty. The Cairo Conference statement simply noted that it was one of the objectives of the Three Great Allies, so the Cairo Conference statement cannot be regarded as being valid simply because of its inclusion in the Potsdam Declaration.

It was the Cairo Conference statement, however, that motivated the Chiang Kai-shek regime to occupy Taiwan. This led Taiwan's people to 40 years of terror under the Kuomintang reign and also gave rise to one of today's toughest of international challenges-the Taiwan problem. This shows that the Cairo Conference statement stipulating the "restoration" of Taiwan, once ruled by the Qing dynasty, to the Republic of China was a product of ignorance of the regional history.

The Qing was a state built by the Manchus, and the Qing colonized Taiwan like the Manchus ruled China as a colony. When Chinese resistance against the Qing dynasty increased in intensity after the 20th century had set in, the slogan "Let's destroy the Qing and rebuild China!" put up by Sun Yat-sen, later adored as the "founding father of the Republic of China," evoked the sympathy of the Chinese people, who had been under the colonial rule of the Manchus. The leaders of the Republic of China never in the least showed interest in Taiwan, even after they had built their republic following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912. In 1936 Chairman Mao Zedong of the People's Republic of China declared that he supported the independence of Taiwan-testament to the fact that he had not considered the island part of China.

A state called "China" was first established in the name of the Republic of China. China is short for both the Republic of China and People's Republic of China. Since in English translations the two different republics use the word "China" instead of the Chinese characters naming the country, pronounced "Zhongguo," it appears that people with no knowledge of Chinese do not understand the difference. In fact, "China" is a geographical name and also refers to a succession of states built there in the past. The states, built in China by the non-Chinese, have a longer history than the states built by the Chinese themselves.

The Cairo Conference statement describes Japan as having stolen Formosa and the Pescadores from the Chinese, but they were unmistakably a part of Japan in view of the historical fact that they had been ceded to Japan by the Chinese under the peace treaty concluded after the end of the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. At the Cairo Conference, Chiang Kai-shek did not demand the return of Formosa and the Pescadores to the Republic of China; it was an abrupt proposal made by U.S. President Roosevelt. A note about this proposal, which came as a total surprise to Chiang, was recorded in "The Autobiography of Chiang Kai-shek," written by an aide who had accompanied the top Nationalist Party leader to the Cairo Conference. Around the time the Cairo Conference was held, the Chiang government had been cornered by the Japanese in Chongqing, in hinterland China, so President Roosevelt, in a bid to encourage Chiang Kai-shek and keep him from dropping out of the Allied forces by concluding a separate peace with Japan, presumably made the aforesaid proposal without giving much thought to Taiwan.

The same can be said of President Truman, who succeeded Roosevelt upon his death; had he been aware of the situations in China and Taiwan, Truman would have realized the tragedy in store for Taiwan in the event Chiang-led Nationalist forces occupied the island. There was indeed no reason to allow the Kuomintang army to take Taiwan, despite the inclusion of the statement in question in the Cairo Declaration. Had the Americans occupied Taiwan, as in the case of Japan, Taiwan, which had been advanced economically and culturally, would have attained independence ahead of the other Afro-Asian colonies soon thrown into raging postwar independence movements.

3. Taiwan's tragedy begins with occupation
by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist troops

On Oct. 1945, about 12,000 Nationalist Chinese troops landed at Keelung on board U.S. Seventh Fleet ships. They wore dirty padded uniforms and rubber-soled socks used by peasants, instead of combat boots, some of them carrying with them pots and kettles and even bamboo baskets with chickens inside. They walked in disorderly files, chatting. In the eyes of Taiwan's people who had been used to seeing well-disciplined Japanese soldiers, these occupation troops from the mainland were like a massive flock of vagabonds. Yet the islanders gave them a hearty welcome.

Japanese education over the past half century had made many islanders think that they were Japanese. The Taiwanese who had fought as gallantly as the Japanese in World War II were equally shocked from losing the war. Chiang's government called out to them, "You are Chinese, not Japanese. You've returned to the bosom of your motherland." The defeated were turned into the victorious overnight. Naturally, this gladdened the Taiwanese.

On Oct. 24, Gen. Chen Yi, who was accorded by Chiang Kai-shek full power, both administrative and military, flew into Taiwan aboard a U.S. military plane, accompanied by staff officers. The following day, there was a ceremony of Japanese surrender between Gen. Chen Yi and his Japanese counterpart, Gen. Rikichi Ando, then governor-general of Taiwan, at which all forms of authority exercised by the Japanese over the island were transferred to the Republic of China. At the same time, all the Japanese public assets and all the Japanese corporate and private assets were requisitioned by the Kuomintang as enemy property. The enormous amount of assets formed in Taiwan by the Japanese over the past 50 years thus effortlessly fell into the hands of the Nationalist Chinese Party. The Kuomintang, which requisitioned the Japanese assets in Taiwan, made them the possessions of the Republic of China, as well as of the Nationalist Party, but there were more than a few assets stolen by party cadres. As is the case of dictatorial communist states, the Kuomintang made no distinction between government and party assets; hence, it became the world's wealthiest political entity. After the Japanese had left Taiwan, exiles from the mainland dominated senior government, judicial and police posts and also went so far as to take away middle management positions from a considerable number of Taiwanese officials. In due course of time, connections and dirty money came to be everything in a wide spectrum of government circles, which led to a quick collapse of the constitutional system that had been established during the days of Japanese colonial rule.

Mainland refugees in Taiwan also cornered rice and sugar, using bills issued by the Bank of Taiwan, and profiteered by selling such farm produce on the mainland. The random reprinting of Bank of Taiwan notes gave rise to ruinous inflation, and four years later, in 1949, the government knocked four zeroes off the currency. As a result of Nationalist usurpations, famine broke out in affluent Taiwan, which had never experienced food shortages, even during World War II. In such circumstances, the Taiwanese grew increasingly frustrated day by day at being ruled by the Kuomintang. In 1947, about one year after the beginning of the occupation by the Nationalist Chinese, the situation on the island became so alarming that public dissatisfaction threatened to explode like sparks igniting gas.

4. February 28 Incident

On the evening of Feb. 28, 1949, in Taipei, a Kuomintang police officer nabbed an aged woman red-handed for black-marketing cigarettes and beat her up after confiscating the cigarettes and all the takings from her. Some passers-by, who happened to witness the scene, soon began surrounding the two, berating the cop for handling the old woman so roughly. The scared policeman took to his heels as he fired upon them. At that time, one in the crowd was shot and died instantly. Rumor of the incident quickly spread citywide, and the following day, indignant citizens thronged the chief executive's office in protest. Military policemen then fired machine guns at the crowd of protestors, wounding and killing dozens of them. From this flared up a Taiwanese armed uprising. Islanders who occupied the broadcasting station in the city, radioed to fellow citizens what had happened and called on them to join in the uprising. In this way, the armed rebellion spread like wildfire throughout the island. Alarmed, Kuomintang troops confined themselves to military bases in various localities while Chief Executive Chen Yi pretended to be trying to bring the situation under control through negotiations. In response, the Taiwanese people set up a committee of elected representatives to deal with the island-wide rebellion. On March 7, the committee demanded political reforms of Chen Yi, including according a high degree of autonomy to the Taiwanese and guaranteeing their basic human rights. But the chief executive abruptly changed his attitude as Kuomintang army reinforcements from the mainland landed on Taiwan March 8-9. The troops indiscriminately fired at roadside islanders and, when some hid indoors, started arresting them systematically. Fearing the recurrence of an armed resistance, the Kuomintang caught leading and intellectual citizens with clout among the public, killing many of them. Among these victims were men of influence executed in public by firing squads as a warning, as well as young highbrows who, tied up in a row, were hurled into the sea and rivers alive. It is said that 20,000 to 30,000 people were killed in the Feb. 28 Incident.

Scenes of mainlanders maltreating native islanders like animals and killing them with unimaginable brutality drove home to Taiwan's people that they really were not Chinese. The murderous event thus became one of the watersheds in Taiwanese history.

Washington, which had offered aid to Chiang Kai-shek and sent an advisory group to China, supposedly knew about the utter corruption of the Kuomintang and its power having been shored up by terrorism. The "White Paper on China," released in Aug. 1949 by the U.S. State Department, gave a full account of the extreme corruption and terrorism of the Kuomintang, and of the indiscriminate and premeditated murder of Taiwanese leaders by the Nationalist government at the time of the Feb. 28 Incident.

Had the U.S. government realized at the end of World War II that Taiwan was a law-abiding society more advanced than China economically and culturally, it could have predicted the black tragedy arising from allowing Chiang Kai-shek's government to take control of Taiwan, and the Americans might have occupied the island instead. If this had been so, what would have become of Taiwan thereafter? The answer can be found in the example of Japan.

Japan abolished the feudal system and installed a centralized government in the Meiji Restoration of 1868, but the Freedom and People's Rights Movement rose immediately afterwards in quest of rapid democratization. The modernization of Japan was what the government and the people equally aspired to. The Japanese government forged ahead with democratization, modeling itself after the modern democracies and constitutional monarchies in Western Europe. In the 20th century there was in Japan a period in which democracy was glorified-the so-called period of "Taisho Democracy" (1912-1926)-but as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, Marxist influences grew strong, and there was the rise of rightists as a counterforce. Political developments in Western Europe followed a similar course. In Britain and France, where democracy was a political tradition, the liberalists stuck it out in safeguarding democracy, whereas in Germany and Italy, each with a shallow history of democracy, liberalism weakened in the crossfire between the left- and right-wingers, eventually allowing the Nazis and Fascists to rise to power. In Japan, on the other hand, the rightists were not as powerful as the Nazis and Fascists, and the military bureaucrats, closely tied with the rightists, took over at the helm of state. The Japanese Diet thus gradually ceased to function properly in the l930s. But when Japan surrendered in World War II, the Diet quickly restored its normal functions, accelerating the democratization of Japan with the cooperation of the American occupation forces.

In Taiwan, until 1934 when it took on a more wartime look, a movement was in full swing to create its version of the Japanese Diet, against the backdrop of the so-called "Taisho Democracy." Even in wartime, liberalism had strong influences over higher schools in Japan, and the Taipei Higher School was the very Mecca of liberalists in Taiwan. If the Americans had taken Taiwan, it would have achieved full-fledged democratization as in the case of Japan, with the collaboration of liberalist islanders and the occupation authorities. This is in no way irrational guesswork, given the reality that the demise of Chiang Ching-kuo prompted Taiwan to forge ahead with democratization led by the liberalists, among whom was President Lee Teng-hui, a 1942 graduate of the Taipei Higher School and survivor of the Kuomintang reign of terror.

5. White Terror

In less than one year after World War II, a civil war flared up again on the mainland with the failure of collaboration between the Nationalist and Communist parties. During the Kuomintang-Communist conflict, the covert secret agent activities of both sides weighed as much as the overt military operations. Such agent services refer to a wide variety of intelligence services. Their common duties of paramount importance were to defend power. They set up surveillance networks in the Kuomintang, armed forces, government offices, schools and even leading business entities to keep a close watch over people working there. The Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, each initially modeled after the Soviet Communist Party, were so alike that not surprisingly they were called "one-egg twins." It was thanks to aid and guidance provided by the Soviets that the Kuomintang had managed to unify China by bringing under control warlords who had divided China and fought against one another for supremacy. On the other hand, the Chinese Communist Party was established as the Chinese branch of the Comintern, an auxiliary organ of the Soviet Communist Party. Viewed in this context, it may be said that the Soviet Communist Party fathered the Chinese Communist Party and fostered the Kuomintang. Under Soviet pressure, the two rival parties had worked together, and Mao Zedong and other Chinese Communists had joined the Kuomintang as they retained their own party status. But well aware that each was an enemy to the other, both parties realized that sooner or later they would have to fight each other for hegemony.

When civil war resumed, special agents of both parties tried to whittle away at the other by intimidation and bribery, and they stopped at nothing to assassinate whoever stood in their way. In 1948, it became clear that the war was turning against the Nationalist Party with the demoralized Kuomintang troops no match for the disciplined Communist forces. The Kuomintang, in a move to secure Nationalist safety in Taiwan, imprisoned or murdered a multitude of islanders it could not trust. Such Kuomintang terrorism was called the "White Terror."

The Republic of China's constitution, enforced in Taiwan in December 1947, was virtually suspended in accordance with a "special mobilization law for the repression of rebellion" proclaimed in May of the following year, on the grounds that the Nationalists were fighting to put an end to the civil war on the mainland. In May 1949, the Kuomintang placed the whole of Taiwan under martial law, thereby legalizing military rule over the island. This martial law, which lasted for 38 years until 1987, is the longest ever in world history. It rigidly banned all forms of democratic activity, such as assemblies, labor strikes, petitions and demonstrations, and ordained that whoever spread any demagoguery, attempted any riot, disturbed public order by labor strikes or led any student strike should be punishable with death. Ordinary citizens who simply criticized the Kuomintang were arrested by Kuomintang agents on suspicion of violating the anti-subversive activity law and clandestinely put on military trial to be sentenced to imprisonment with a minimum of seven years of hard labor. During this "White Terror," several tens of thousands of people were executed, and hundreds of thousands of others were jailed as political prisoners.

6. Korean War and U.S. "containment policy" against China

On Oct. 1, 1949, the Chinese Communist Party, which won the civil war, proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. The Nationalists fled to Taiwan. Their treasured air force, navy and tank units had already moved out to the island. The Taiwan Strait is 150 kilometers wide, about four times the breadth of the Straits of Dover, and it was impossible for the Chinese Communists to attack Taiwan because they hardly had sea and air forces of their own. Chiang Kai-shek, who considered Taiwan the base of a "counter-thrust into the mainland," advocated the downfall of the Chinese Communist government by claiming the Kuomintang was the legitimate government of China.

Viewed from the standpoint of international law, however, it can be said that the Republic of China had ceased to exist as a sovereign state at the time it was relocated to Taiwan. The government of the Republic of China had Taiwan proper, the Penghu Islands and the islanders under its rule; though, back then, the two islands had still been a part of Japan legally. Unless three requirements-the people and the territory recognized by international law and the government administering them-are met, any nation is not recognizable under international law as a sovereign state. The Republic of China, with no territory of its own recognized by international law, was not a sovereign state. Chiang Kai-shek's government should have been called otherwise a "regime-in-exile" resisting the Chinese Communist government from the occupied island of Taiwan.

All the Communist nations under Moscow's hegemony recognized the People's Republic of China as soon as it came into being. In January 1950, Britain followed suit ahead of other free bloc nations. All other countries were held likely to do so soon. Then the situation changed all of a sudden. On June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out with the North Koreans (the People's Republic of North Korea) invading South Korea (the Republic of Korea). On June 27, the United Nations' Security Council adopted a U.S. proposal calling on the U.N. members to repel the North Koreans in support of South Korea. The Soviet Union could not veto the U.S. proposal because of its absence from the Security Council session. The absence was in protest against a rejection by the Security Council of a Soviet proposal calling for the replacement of the Republic of China with the People's Republic of China as a U.N. member. The same day, U.S. President Truman ordered U.S. forces to the Korean Peninsula while stating, at the same time, "The legal status of Taiwan is yet to be determined." He sent the U.S. Seventh Fleet to the sea near Taiwan and then declared the neutralization of the Taiwan Strait. Presumably, Truman did so not so much for the defense of Taiwan as for fear of the U.S. being drawn into the Chinese civil war from a Kuomintang assault on the mainland.

When he said "The legal status of Taiwan is yet to be determined," the U.S. president probably meant to say that it was not yet clear to whom Taiwan should belong following Japan's giving up the island under a peace treaty. In 1951, that peace treaty, the Treaty of San Francisco, was concluded between Japan and the Allies, making Japan's abandonment of Taiwan and the Penghu Islands a fait accompli. Yet, no decision had been made whatsoever as to which of the Allies Taiwan should belong, thus putting the legal status of the island proper and the Penghu Islands on the back burner.

With the command of U.N. forces in Korea accorded the U.S., President Truman named Gen. MacArthur supreme commander. In October 1950, when U.N. forces drove the North Koreans almost to the Chinese and North Korean border, the Chinese intervened, in a surprise move, to support the North Koreans, and thus the Korean War intensified yet further with all the troops involved advancing and then falling into retreat repeatedly.

In the U.S., which was now fighting Chinese on the Korean front, Washington's past China policy allowing the communization of the mainland was severely criticized while the public started harboring violent anti-Chinese sentiment in the face of ever-increasing American casualties. Against this backdrop of domestic circumstances, the U.S. government adopted a "policy of containing China" and provided the Chiang Kai-shek government with massive military and economic aid in an attempt to bolster the Kuomintang. This promoted Taiwan's economic development, serving the islanders in good stead. The U.S. treated Chiang Kai-shek like an anti-Communist hero and turned a blind eye to the Kuomintang's "White Terror."

American support of the Republic of China's permanent membership on the U.N. Security Council was part of Washington's "China containment policy," designed to prevent Beijing's admission to the U.N. But Washington was too high-handed in trying to get Nationalist China, which had lost all of China and possessed not a single territory recognized by international law, to retain Chinese representation in the U.N. This produced untoward aftereffects.

7. Prison without bars

Washington's decision to cooperate in the defense of Taiwan dispelled fears of a possible Chinese Communist attack on the island. But this did not necessarily set Chiang Kai-shek's government at ease, for the February 28 Incident had been a lingering nightmarish memory not only to the Taiwanese, but to the Kuomintang regime as well. When the Taiwanese uprising in arms did occur, it was crushed by Nationalist reinforcements from the mainland. The Kuomintang regime would have found it impossible to ask for reinforcements from anywhere else had a similar incident broken out. Moreover, in a move to bolster the Nationalist forces, the Kuomintang had mandated the conscription of Taiwanese into the army since January 1950, and there was fear that they might side with fellow native islanders once the latter rebelled.

Therefore, the Chiang Kai-shek government, in order to defend its power, conducted thoroughgoing education to turn the Taiwanese into Chinese while at the same time installing a policy meant to stifle their spirit of resistance by planting fear in their hearts. First hammering Chinese ethnocentrism into the Taiwanese minds, the Nationalists also thoroughly indoctrinated the Taiwanese younger generations with thoughts that China is a great power with the world's oldest historical and cultural traditions and that the Chinese are the world's greatest race. And the great Chiang Kai-shek was deified as the supreme leader of China. The islanders were also taught that the Kuomintang army had liberated their compatriots by defeating the powerful Japanese forces. In regard to the fact that the great Chiang Kai-shek was expelled from the Chinese mainland, Taiwanese youths were told that it had been engineered by the powerful Soviets, not by the Chinese Communists, and that mainland China was nothing but a Soviet stooge. Hence, it was stressed that the Taiwanese should get united firmly under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek to recover the mainland and liberate their compatriots by overthrowing the Communist government. In Taiwan, students on primary school to college levels were taught Chinese history and geography only, not in the least Taiwanese history and geography. Education like this was obviously designed to prevent them from identifying themselves as Taiwanese.

But Taiwan's people who had survived the days under Japanese colonial rule knew that the Kuomintang education was a sheer lie. As many as 200,000 Taiwanese had joined the Japanese army to fight in World War II, and it was not the Chinese but the Americans that defeated the Japanese. It was not the Chinese, either, but the Americans that bombed military installations and cities in Taiwan. The Japanese bureaucrats were honest and incorruptible, well policing the whole island. Undeniably, the Japanese treated the Taiwanese as second-rate citizens but had imprisoned none of them in disregard of law. Taiwanese society under Japanese colonial rule and the one under Chiang Kai-shek's domination were as different from each other as Heaven and Hell. As a matter of fact, adult islanders used to risk their lives to tell this to children who knew not the days of Japanese colonial domination, for if what the children had heard from them reached the ears of Kuomintang agents, these adults would have been quickly arrested and punished on charges of rebellion. Tens of hundreds of Taiwanese were jailed in this way and many of them executed by firing squad; though, in fact, few or no people had plotted against the Kuomintang government. The purpose of Kuomintang terrorism lay not in detecting citizens suspected of plotting against the government but in keeping the Taiwanese in the grip of fear lest they grew restive against the ruling power. Obviously, there was the possibility of any citizen being arrested by Kuomintang agents on impulse.

In 1994, President Lee, who was going all-out in promoting the democratization of Taiwan, told Ryotaro Shiba, a celebrated Japanese writer, "Few fellow Taiwanese citizens, now in their seventies, have once had a good night sleep. I don't want our offspring to have a similar experience. I want to make Taiwan a land where all people can sleep at night in perfect peace." His words are a precise testament to the situation in Taiwan during the Kuomintang reign of White Terror. In Taiwan back then, the inflow of information from outside the island had been rigidly controlled. Because of this, the islanders living during this dark age called Taiwan "the prison without bars."

8. Taiwanese independence movement

Taiwan's people were unable to entertain any hopes for the future though they graduated from university or technical college. It was mainlanders alone who held key posts at government offices and public schools. Most of the leading companies in Taiwan, once run by the Japanese, were requisitioned by the Kuomintang, and exiles from the mainland monopolized important positions. Kuomintang leaders sent their sons and/or daughters to the U.S. and Canada and remitted to them enormous amounts of money they had acquired in Taiwan so that they themselves could flee Taiwan in case of an emergency. On the other hand, young Taiwanese intellectuals with no hopes for the future lived every day in frustration, ever haunted by the fear that they might be arrested at any moment as political prisoners. The Chiang Kai-shek government, presumably afraid of these youths' pent-up frustrations exploding, authorized only those to get out of Taiwan who had finished their military service after graduating from university or technical college and passed examinations for studying abroad. Young intellectuals scrambled for this tiny exit out of the prison without bars. The U.S. topped the list of countries they wanted to go to for study, followed by Japan, Canada and West European countries-democracies that, without a single exception, guaranteed freedom of speech, press and assembly.

Upon enjoying a free atmosphere, these Taiwanese students keenly realized the abnormal situation in which Taiwan had been placed, and together they criticized the political terrorism of the Kuomintang government. Among those students living in free countries were many who were convinced that it was their responsibility to liberate their motherland-Taiwan.

In Japan, like-minded Taiwanese who had lived there since the prewar days organized a pro-Taiwanese independence movement with, as their leaders, figures who had escaped Taiwan at the time of the February 28 Incident. They wrote a petition to the U.N., asking it to see to it that Taiwan determine its own future by putting the issue of rule to a popular vote after having the island put under the trust of the U.N. But the U.N. did not accept their petition because the Republic of China was a permanent member of the Security Council.
Starting around the end of the 1950s, Taiwanese students in the U.S., Japan, Canada and Western Europe organized movements for the independence of Taiwan, respectively. Participation in such movements required considerable courage. The Kuomintang had sent agents to schools abroad where many students from Taiwan were enrolled and kept them under close surveillance. From the beginning, most of these Taiwanese students had no intention of returning to the prison without bars, but had they been found by agents to be engaged in such pro-independence activities, they would have been forbidden to return home even temporarily to see their parents, brothers and sisters. In fact, there were cases in which the relatives of some such students were pressured by the Nationalist government for the students' participation in independence movement activities abroad. It was for this reason that only a few students openly took part in such movements and that many were active clandestinely. Some students were arrested for their activities when taking a short trip home, having had been detected by the Kuomintang. Participation in pro-independence campaigns also meant a great sacrifice for students. As the government had strictly outlawed remittances overseas in valuable foreign currency, all students had to work part-time through school except those who were awarded scholarships from their host countries. It also happened that less diligent students had their qualifications as students nullified and were compulsorily sent home. This compelled most to study hard. A majority of students from Taiwan had graduated from university on the island, and they mainly took post-graduate courses at the foreign schools where they were enrolled. More than 100,000 Taiwanese students earned a master's degree or a doctorate by dividing their time between study and a sideline job, such as doing dishes at a restaurant.
Despite their difficult circumstances, students from Taiwan organized independence movements in various countries in the interest of their motherland and also exchanged views among themselves by printing out publications. They had a consensus of opinion on the objective of their independence movements-transforming Taiwan into a free, democratic nation. But there were many challenges to cope with in actually forging ahead with their erstwhile activities. The first and foremost question was "What should Taiwan become independent from?" Many were of the opinion that Taiwan should win independence from China. This was because the Chiang Kai-shek government claimed to be the "legitimate regime of China" but also because the Republic of China acquired Chinese representation in the U.N. as a permanent member of the Security Council. But it was obvious from a square look at reality that such a Kuomintang claim was nothing more than a fiction because the Nationalists had had not a single piece of land to govern on the mainland. In the end, those struggling for the independence of Taiwan reached a consensus that "China refers to the People's Republic of China." Given the fact that Beijing has neither ruled Taiwan nor has the island under its control now, it is not logical to think that Taiwanese independence should be "independence from China."
Beijing clamored for the "liberation of Taiwan" and insisted, "We are resolved to liberate Taiwan even by use of force." The Taiwanese, for their part, did not want the Chinese Communists to do so. For them, Communist China was a dangerous foreign country, and its objective, clear: occupation and annexation of Taiwan. This means nothing but aggression. Pro-independence activists dedicated to the cause of Taiwanese independence made "Oppose Chinese aggression toward Taiwan" one of their movement slogans in order to explain, in concise and explicit terms, that to Taiwan, mainland China is a foreign country and that "the liberation of Taiwan" as claimed by Beijing is synonymous with aggression. Subsequently, Beijing rephrased "liberation of Taiwan" to "reunification of Taiwan," but the wording makes no difference whatsoever; the implication of aggression is still the same.
Well, then, from what does Taiwan aspire to become independent?

As a result of exhaustive discussion within the circles of independence activists, a conclusion was reached that "Taiwanese independence" should be independence from Beijing, and they defined the Nationalist establishment as follows: a system whereby mainlanders who followed the regime of Chiang Kai-shek in exile to Taiwan have lorded it over the islanders by supporting the Kuomintang's one-party rule on the fictitious premise that the Nationalist regime is the legitimate government of China.

As long as the Kuomintang government existed, it was hopelessly difficult to rebuild Taiwan into a free and democratic nation; hence, the Taiwanese independence activists decided that "Down with the Kuomintang" should be the slogan of primary importance and "Oppose Chinese Communist aggression toward Taiwan" a slogan of secondary importance.

Next, their debates began to focus on ways to overthrow the Kuomintang establishment. In those days, Mao Zedong's guerrilla tactics that led to the victory of the Chinese Communist Party and the Fidel Castro-led guerrillas who achieved the Cuban Revolution had been rated highly. Because of this, there was an opinion favoring the formation of guerrillas in Taiwan, but a brief study of guerrilla tactics sufficed to show that organizing guerrillas on the island was absolutely impracticable.

Guerrillas with no bases of their own are doomed to perish. This is the iron rule of guerrilla tactics. Bases for guerrillas should be places where they can procure arms and provisions and recruit reinforcements. It may be said that such bases are territory where they can defend themselves from attacks by government troops. Construction of such guerrilla bases is impossible in any country that does not have any area beyond reach of government authority. Taiwan is a sea-girt land with well-developed infrastructure, such as roads and means of transport and communications, where government power reaches down to the remotest village. By any stretch of the imagination, it would be impossible to organize guerrillas in a land like this. So, the independence activists' conclusion was that in overthrowing the Kuomintang establishment, there would be no alternative but to democratize Taiwan through patience and persistence.

The Taiwanese accounted for 87 percent, and the mainlanders, only 13 percent of the island's population. Moreover, the intellectual level of the Taiwanese people was high thanks to widespread education. Pro-Taiwanese independence movement activists concentrated their efforts on appealing to the islanders the importance of freedom and democracy, fully convinced that if the majority of Taiwanese people became aware of their virtual slave-like status, in which they lived as meekly as dictated by the Nationalists in power, and came to press harder and louder for democratization, the Kuomintang would find it not so easy to oppress the islanders as in the past-especially given the fact that the percentage of islanders in the armed forces was growing higher annually.

It was "Taiwan Seinen (Taiwan Youth)," a monthly issued by an independence movement group active in Japan, that performed a leading role in the ideological aspect of pro-Taiwanese independence campaigns. In 1968, this publication became a joint bulletin for similar activist groups in the U.S., Europe and Canada, and in 1970, four of these groups were integrated to form the "World United Formosans for Independence."

9. Ideal chance to resolve the Taiwan question lost

Many Taiwanese, independence movement activists included, had expected that doing away with fictitious Chinese representation in the U.N. by the Nationalists could serve as a major step forward in the democratization of Taiwan. If the People's Republic of China acquired a permanent membership on the Security Council and Nationalist China remained an ordinary member of the U.N., it would follow that the world body would have to acknowledge the actual existence of two separate Chinas, one on the mainland and the other in Taiwan. This meant the outright denial of the fiction supporting the Kuomintang as the legitimate government of China.

The National Assembly in Taiwan consisted largely of members who had fled to Taiwan from various parts of the mainland together with the Chiang Kai-shek government, and their presence in the legislature formed the basis on which the Republic of China claimed to be the sole legitimate government of China. Those statesmen holding their seats without facing elections were called in Taiwan "perennial lawmakers" on grounds that they had not been able to run for elections on the mainland with their electoral districts occupied by the Communists. In Taiwan, therefore, they had no power as legislators as they had no civic backing. Their job was to receive handsome pays as such and to vote in favor of government-sponsored bills. The National Assembly was thus nothing more than an instrument of the Kuomintang dictatorship. If the fiction of Chinese representation in the U.N. by the Nationalist Republic was negated, the Kuomintang would not be able to expect to sustain for long the system allowing perennial lawmakers to continue holding their seats in Taiwan. The Kuomintang had suspended the enforcement of the constitution and imposed martial law on the pretext that they were fighting a civil war against the Chinese Communists. But, if the U.N. recognized the existence of two separate states, i.e., China and Taiwan, the Kuomintang argument would be indefensible since no civil war was actually under way in Taiwan. It was for this reason that the functional normalization of the U.N. was expected to serve as a great opportunity for Taiwan to democratize.

The problem of Chinese representation had been discussed annually at the autumn regular session of the U.N. General Assembly, and gradually, the number of member nations supporting admission of the People's Republic of China to the U.N. increased. At the 1970 U.N. General Assembly meeting, the Republic of Albania presented a resolution backing the entry of Beijing into the U.N., and the resolution was adopted with 51 votes in favor, 49 against and 25 abstentions. For the first time, "yes" votes outnumbered "no" votes. Eventually, however, the Albanian-sponsored resolution was rejected as the problem of Chinese representation had been designated in advance as an "important item on the agenda." Designation of any "important item on the agenda" is decided by a majority approval of the U.N. General Assembly, but the adoption of any resolution, once designated as an "important item on the agenda," needs approval by two-thirds or more of the member nations.

In July 1971, Henry Kissinger, then assistant to the U.S. president, made a secret trip to mainland China, where after talks with Premier Zhou Enlai, he stunned the whole world with a bombshell announcement: "President Richard Nixon will visit the People's Republic of China by May next year." Washington abandoned its containment policy against China. This made Communist China's affiliation with the U.N. at the U.N. General Assembly session, set for autumn of that year, a foregone conclusion. The U.S. government made public a policy of "allowing the People's Republic of China into the U.N. in its capacity as a permanent member of the Security Council and leaving the Republic of China in Taiwan intact as a U.N. member." The problem was how to enable the Nationalist Republic to retain its seat in the U.N. The said Albanian resolution (U.N. General Assembly Resolution 2758) had been presented to the U.N. by Beijing through Albania in an attempt to oust the Republic of China from the U.N. and seat the People's Republic of China in its place. It was written in this resolution that "the People's Republic of China is the sole representative of China in the U.N. and China represented by Chiang Kai-shek should be expelled quickly from the U.N. and all of its organs."

It was in no way difficult to let the Republic of China stay on in the U.N. as in the past, however. It had only to give up its post as a permanent member of the Security Council. The problem of Chinese representation in the U.N. was about which side-the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China in Taiwan-should represent China. Taiwanese representation was totally out of question. If the Republic of China abandoned its seat on the Security Council, the republic would give up simultaneously its Chinese representation in the U.N. This meant that the Republic of China would become a U.N. member representing Taiwan only. In order to expel any member nation from the U.N., it requires a Security Council recommendation and approval by more than two-thirds of the member nations at a U.N. General Assembly session. Nationalist China's expulsion could not even be put on the agenda at the General Assembly session with just the U.S. exercising its veto power. Not a single nation has ever been ousted from the U.N. regardless of whether it ever waged an aggressive war, whether it ever perpetrated acts of terrorism or whether it was a tyrannical state that killed millions of its people. As a matter of fact, it is almost impossible to purge any member nation from the U.N.

Notwithstanding this, on Oct. 25, 1971, the U.N. passed the Albanian resolution by an overwhelming majority, with 76 votes in favor, 35 against, and 17 abstentions, thus forcing Taipei to abdicate its seat to Beijing. Before this was a U.S. proposal presented to the U.N. designating the Albanian proposal to deprive the Republic of China of its representation in the U.N. as an important item on the agenda-and thus force the difficult two-third's majority passage of the item. The U.S. proposal was rejected with 55 votes in favor, 59 against, with 15 abstentions. The Albanian resolution was approved. If the U.S., instead of bringing forward such a proposal, had made the Republic of China abandon its seat on the Security Council, its expulsion could not have happened. In that event, there would have been no choice for the People's Republic of China but to become a permanent member of the Security Council, and the Taiwan problem would have been resolved by letting Beijing and Taipei have their separate seats in the U.N.

How come that the U.S. made such an appalling blunder? Maybe because the People's Republic of China back then was no longer a country without sea and air forces, as it had been in its early days; rather, it had grown into a military giant, possessing even nuclear missiles. The Republic of China, in contrast, defended Taiwan with weapons supplied by the U.S. under a security treaty, the U.S.-Republic of China Mutual Defense Treaty. However, it was quite obvious that if expelled from the U.N., the Nationalist Republic would be isolated from the rest of the world, making it impossible sooner or later to maintain the U.S.-Republic of China Treaty. What is more, the deprivation of Nationalist China's seat on the Security Council was a fait accompli, so, had the U.S. had simply told Chiang Kai-shek that in order to retain U.N. membership that there was no alternative left for his Republic of China but to give up its Security Council seat, he would have had to listen.

On Sept. 13, 1971, before attending a session of the U.N. General Assembly, the Kuomintang foreign minister, Chou Shu-kai told a gathering of leading officials of the Chiang Kai-shek government: "Importantly, we should remain in the U.N. General Assembly. If we do so, Beijing may not come in. Even if Beijing joins the U.N., we should stay with the General Assembly." The "United Daily News," in its Sept. 15 editorial, said: "To us, the U.N. is a great asset and a bastion absolutely worth holding out. If we withdrew from the U.N. rashly, we would not be able to find a second U.N." Without permission from absolute dictator Chiang Kai-shek, the foreign minister could not have made such remarks nor could the newspaper have quoted what he had said. Chiang Kai-shek had been well aware of the importance of Nationalist China retaining its seat in the U.N.

But, the American ambassador to Taiwan at the time, who had taken at face value Chiang Kai-shek's usual rhetoric about the "Kuomintang as the legitimate government of China," reported to Washington that Chiang was not going to give up permanent membership on the Security Council. The U.S. government apparently believed the report to be true. Kissinger's visit to Beijing had been kept top secret, so all but only a few leading U.S. government officials were taken aback upon learning of the abrupt shift in Washington's policy on Beijing. This presumably led the U.S. government to commit a careless mistake in dealing with the Taiwan question. Such a simple error delayed Taiwan's democratization and also has left the Taiwan problem unsolved to date.