Explainer | Why Taiwan’s legal status has sparked fresh row among rival political camps as Japan treaty remembered

Pro-independence and KMT speakers clash over forum to mark 1952 ROC-Japan peace treaty

Former president Ma Ying-jeou says it is absurd for ruling Democratic Progressive Party to deny legitimacy of own administration.

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Independence-leaning politicians and scholars say a 1952 peace treaty with Japan fails to explicitly state whether Taiwan’s sovereignty belongs to Taipei or Beijing. Photo: SOPA Images via Zuma

Published: 6:11pm, 5 May 2022Updated: 8:45pm, 5 May 2022

The question of whether Taiwan’s legal status is undecided has sparked fresh debates between the two rival political camps in the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own.

The trigger for the latest controversy was a recent forum in Taipei hosted by the government-backed research institution Academia Historica, to mark the 70th anniversary of the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty.

Independence-leaning politicians and scholars at the April 23 forum supported the view that the political status of Taiwan remained undecided when Japan, which ruled the island from 1895 to 1945, surrendered at the end of World War II.

The row – going back decades – focuses on the validity of the 1943 Cairo Declaration and 1945 Potsdam Proclamation, and whether the Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty signed after Japan’s surrender to the allied forces clarifies the status of Taiwan.

What are the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation?

The declaration was the outcome of a meeting between then US president Franklin Roosevelt, British prime minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese Nationalist or Kuomintang (KMT) leader Chiang Kai-shek in Cairo, Egypt in November 1943, as Japan showed signs of defeat in both the second Sino-Japanese war and world war.

It sought to set goals for the post-war order, including stripping Japan of all islands in the Pacific it had seized or occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and returning all territories, including Manchuria, Formosa (Taiwan) and Pescadores (Penghu) to the Republic of China (ROC), founded in 1912 after the Qing empire was overthrown.