Taipei/Beijing (Reuters)-The Taiwan government said on Wednesday that China is trying to create the legal basis for a future attack with its “misleading” interpretation of an important resolution of the United Nations (UN) in a growing dispute over who has the right to claim sovereignty over the island.
China states that 1971 UN Resolution 2758, which led to the expulsion of Taiwan from the agency and the assumption of a UN seat by Beijing, gives its claims on the island’s demands, and reiterated this point in a long statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Tuesday.
Taiwan, formally called the Republic of China and whose government fled to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war to the Communists of Mao Tsé-Tung, says this is absurd, as the resolution does not mention Taiwan and that, anyway, the popular republic of China never ruled the island.
Free list
10 Small Caps to Invest
The list of actions of promising sectors of the Scholarship
The Taiwan Foreign Ministry said in a statement that China is “deliberately deceiving” the international community with its characterization of the resolution.
“This aims to create a legal basis to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait and a future military attack on Taiwan,” he said.
“Only Taiwan’s democratically elected government can represent Taiwan’s 23 million inhabitants in the United Nations system and multilateral international mechanisms,” the ministry added.
Continues after advertising
China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a commentary request. China has never renounced the use of force to put Taiwan under its control and regularly sends its military to the waters and the skies around the island.
China states that Taiwan is just one of its provinces.
The statement of his Foreign Ministry on Tuesday, full of language of the Cold War era over the “reactionary” government of the Republic of China and the “dressing room” of his late leader Chiang Kai-Shek, said the People’s Republic is the legitimate heiress of the government of all China, including Taiwan after the 1949 revolution.
Continues after advertising
“Any attempt to challenge Resolution 2758 is not only a challenge to China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also a challenge to the UN authority,” he said.
China was furious with comments from the United States and some of its allies about the resolution.
The US State Department, in comments provided to Reuters on the last Chinese statement on the subject, said that “intentional decharacterization and misuse of resolution 2758” is part of China’s “broader coercive attempts to isolate Taiwan from the international community”.
Continues after advertising
The resolution does not impose boundaries to the sovereign choice of any country to be substantially involved with Taiwan, the State Department added.
(Report by Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo; Additional report by David Brunnstrom in Washington)
