In a television interview last week, Australia’s former Prime Minister Paul Keating said Taiwan’s people “are sitting on Chinese real estate. It’s part of China.” To be more precise, Keating seems to mean that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing has rightful sovereignty over Taiwan.
Keating’s position is ultimately based on realpolitik. In the same interview, he said he thought the United States could not and would not win a Taiwan Strait war and that Australia would incur only disadvantages by siding with America. I’m not challenging those views here. But Keating also makes an inherently legalistic argument about the PRC owning Taiwan, seemingly to make his realpolitik position more palatable. That argument is inaccurate and ahistorical.
Taiwan being “part of China” is not a geographical or legal fact.
Despite what the PRC government says today, the geographic content of “China” has changed over time. Pre-modern Chinese governments considered Taiwan troublesome barbarian territory. Beijing did not formally annex Taiwan until 1684, only to cede it to Japan two centuries later as part of the settlement of the Sino-Japan War of 1894-95. Japan would administer Taiwan as part of the Japanese empire for 50 years, until Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War. On mainland China, a new government established the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912, but a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uprising beginning in 1927 challenged the ROC government. In the 1940s, CCP leader Mao Zedong said publicly that Taiwan should be an independent country.
The ROC government took possession of Taiwan in 1945 as the victorious Allied Powers dismantled Japan’s wartime empire. In 1949, the Communist insurgency overwhelmed the ROC government on the mainland, forcing it to flee to Taiwan, the last province under its control. From 1949 to 1991, it was Taipei’s official position that the CCP government was occupying Chinese real estate that rightfully belonged under ROC sovereignty. Taiwan’s official title is still the Republic of China (not the contrived Olympic moniker “Chinese Taipei”). The CCP government has never ruled Taiwan.
The takeaway is that Taiwan being “part of China” is not a geographical or legal fact. Rather, it is a highly contested political proposition. Even governments that decline to officially recognise Taiwan as a state, such as the United States and Japan, also refuse to recognise PRC sovereignty over Taiwan. Two “China” governments, the PRC and the ROC, currently claim sovereignty over Taiwan. The island is no more PRC real estate than it is ROC real estate.
Self-determination is a basic principle of the liberal political philosophy that prevails in democratic countries. The UN recognises that communities have the “freedom to build their own national states in accordance with the freely expressed will and desire of their peoples.” This was the principle underlying the post-World War II decolonisation movement that created dozens of new countries.
To be sure, self-determination is sometimes impractical, such as in the case of some micro-states. But Taiwan is an easy case. It amply satisfies all the criteria of statehood: a critical mass of population and territory, a government that exercises control over that territory, and the capacity to conduct relations with other states. Moreover, the great majority of Taiwan’s people have made clear they do not wish to be governed by Xi Jinping’s CCP.
The assertion that the Taiwanese occupy PRC real estate is a pithy summary of Beijing’s position, which is that the government controlling mainland China also owns Taiwan, and that the wishes of the people who live there are irrelevant. This position, however, ignores the principle of self-determination. It is particularly odd to see this position echoed by an Australian, whose country is a liberal democracy that became independent from Britain in 1901 because it wanted to.
Keating also said in the interview that US support for Taiwan is comparable to an imaginary scenario in which China encouraged Tasmania to declare itself independent from Australia. Just as this would be “shocking” to Australians, so are the Chinese justified in their determination to “fight to defend Taiwan,” he said.
This analogy, however, is erroneous. Taiwan is far more like Ukraine than Tasmania. PRC armed forces are bulking up not to defend Taiwan, but to conquer it. Tasmania is unambiguously administered by Australia, while Taiwan is a de facto independent country seeking foreign assistance to avoid forcible absorption by China.
What if Tasmania, or California, really wanted independence? Chinese officials often argue that their position of “independence means war” is the same stance any other government would take in a similar situation. This, however, reveals the CCP’s 19th century notion of sovereignty. Modern liberal democracies would settle a secessionist dispute through a referendum. Both Canada (over Quebec, in 1995) and the United Kingdom (Scotland, 2014) handled their respective secession questions this way.
Some may raise practical reasons for not supporting Taiwan’s survival as a democracy, but there is little if any legal or moral justification.
