TAICHUNG (Taiwan News) — News media in a free country is the guard dog of democracy, and no exception should be made for opinion pieces contributed by a country whose government is known for orchestrating a propaganda war against other democracies.
On Thursday (March 23), a prestigious Australian media outlet published an "opinion newsletter" from China's Ambassador to China Xiao Qian (肖千). It had a headline that contained the words "Taiwan will be ours," before later changing it to "Taiwan is always part of China, but war with Australia is a fallacy."
Running an opinion piece with a different viewpoint is fully acceptable, but it should be buttressed and supported by facts. The Sydney Morning Herald failed spectacularly at this fundamental responsibility.
The number of manipulations of what little truth it did contain are staggering and are not something a responsible newspaper should condone. While the Herald did run a rebuttal, the paper ran something straight out of the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) United Front Work Department's cogitative warfare playbook and intended to undermine Australian confidence in a fellow democracy. That is unconscionable.
Let’s go over just some of the falsehoods and distortions peddled by Xiao. Let’s start with “Taiwan is part of China’s territory.”
Taiwan not 'China's territory'
By “China” he means the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not the Republic of China (ROC). Taiwan has never been a part of the PRC, and the people and government of Taiwan are determined it never will be. It continues:
Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times. Starting from the Song and Yuan dynasties, the imperial central governments of China all set up administrative bodies to exercise jurisdiction over Penghu and Taiwan.
There is a very specific reason he mentions Penghu here, and that is because he’s partly correct when it comes to those islands. There are Song Dynasty (960–1279) records of the islands under the name “Penghu” and in the Mongol Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) an official presence was established there to handle piracy.
That had absolutely nothing to do with Taiwan. Taiwan was firmly under Indigenous control, as it had been for thousands of years.
The first foreign power to grab a portion of Taiwan was The Netherlands in the 17th century, and briefly during the same period, a bit of the north was occupied by the Spanish. Ethnic Chinese forces fleeing the incoming Manchurian invasion expelled the Dutch and established a brief Kingdom of Tungning on the southwest coast.
Only following the collapse of the Kingdom of Tungning did Taiwan become a part of the Manchurian Qing empire (1644–1912). However, they never managed to control more than two-thirds of Taiwan, which only happened later under the Japanese empire. Xiao continues:
In 1885, the Qing government officially established Taiwan as a single province, making it the 20th province of China at the time. In 1895, the defeated Qing government was forced to cede Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to Japan.
This is factually true, but it actually undercuts the argument in a way that Xiao probably doesn’t even realise. He included it to fit the “100 years of humiliation” narrative that was in fact largely self-inflicted though weakness brought on by corruption, misrule and civil wars.
The part where it undercuts his argument is that Australians are culturally and politically distinct from the United Kingdom, and became an independent country only in 1901. To put this in perspective, debatably, aside from 1945-1949, Taiwan has maintained far fewer cultural or political ties to China since 1895 than Australia did to the U.K.
That is a long time and a lot has changed culturally on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Taiwanese are more culturally different compared with Chinese, than Australians are different from the British.
Cultural Revolution, Hotel California
To put that in perspective, while the Chinese were overthrowing the Qing Dynasty, engaging in civil war and then fighting off a Japanese invasion, the Taiwanese were dressed in kimonos. They spoke Japanese and the vast majority of Taiwanese combatants were fighting on the side of the Japanese in World War II.
As the Chinese were going through the Great Leap Forward that left millions dead and engaging in the Cultural Revolution, Taiwanese were going to temples and grooving out to "Hotel California" by The Eagles in their bellbottom jeans. Xiao continues:
The Cairo Declaration issued by China, the United States and the United Kingdom in 1943 stated that it was the purpose of the three allies that all the territories Japan had stolen from China, such as Northeast China, Taiwan and the Penghu Islands, should be restored to China.
There are two huge problems with this. If you click on the link to view the Cairo Declaration itself, the first problem is apparent right at the top, as it declares what the statement actually is: A press communique.
It is not a treaty or any sort of binding agreement, nor is it signed. It doesn’t even have the force of a memorandum of understanding.
The second problem is in the line: “All the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China.” Republic of China, not the People’s Republic of China. Xiao then says:
In 1945, the Chinese government announced it was resuming the exercise of sovereignty over Taiwan, and the ceremony to accept Japan’s surrender in Taiwan Province of the China war theatre of the Allied powers was held in Taibei (Taipei).
This is partially correct, as after World War II Taiwan was officially occupied by the Allied Powers, with the U.S. taking the bulk of the responsibility for the Japanese home islands and the ROC occupying the Colony of Formosa on behalf of the Allies. Xiao goes on to say:
From then on, China had recovered Taiwan de jure and de facto through a host of documents with international legal effect.
Huh? I dare you, show me one!
The Treaty of San Francisco came into force in 1952, with Japan renouncing sovereignty over Taiwan — but without specifying where sovereignty over Taiwan was to go.
So, today, many countries, including the United States, hold that sovereignty over Taiwan is “undetermined." It most certainly doesn’t reside with the People’s Republic of China.
Since Xiao’s piece in The Sydney Morning Herald has managed to pack so much nonsense into one piece, we’ll continue this examination in another article.
