The document Taiwan’s International Legal Status Legally Belongs to the Republic of China1 was once the legal shield for the ROC to claim sovereignty. Now, under the William Lai administration, it has completely vanished from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) website2. The bizarre part is not that it was deleted, but why and for whom?
The Absurd Script: From “History Section” to “Total Vanishment”
Let’s look at how this document passed into history:
Initially (May 15, 2022, during the Tsai administration), when calls were made to remove the document, MOFA issued a standard response3. They stated:
- MOFA guards national sovereignty according to the Constitution.
- The current government’s position is “The Republic of China is a sovereign independent state, and is not subordinate to the People’s Republic of China.”
- While the Position Paper on Taiwan’s International Legal Status remained on the site, it was moved to the “History Section” as “part of the undeniable past history.”
MOFA promised at the time to “study appropriate methods to ensure the public does not misunderstand the Ministry’s position.”
Caption: Search results for International Legal Status on official MOFA website
For the highest-level diplomatic agency of a country, dealing with a matter as monumental as national sovereign legal status, promising to “study appropriate methods” and then having those “methods” turn out to be a clean-sweep deletion of the file is unacceptable. It amounts to a public admission: the argument that “the Republic of China legally possesses sovereignty over Taiwan” has become a hot potato for the current government, one they were desperate to discard.
The Core of the Absurdity: Why Defer to a Single Controversial Scholar?
Even more absurd is that the catalyst for all this was a letter of inquiry from a single scholar—Jiang Huang-chi4.
I ask: why should a Ministry of Foreign Affairs, tasked with the heavy responsibility of guarding the national Constitution and territorial sovereignty, base its legal arguments on the opinion of a single scholar with a specific political stance?
Diplomatic officials of the Republic of China are public servants acting according to the Constitution and international law, not assistants to a particular scholar! Your duty is to uphold the country’s greatest legal interests, not to “clean up” historical documents to match a scholar’s political preferences.
This behavior exposes the DPP government’s guilt, weakness, and total lack of confidence when facing the legal link between the “Republic of China” and “Taiwan Province.” They aren’t using law to face politics; they are using politics to annihilate law!
When the file was there: They called it “undeniable past history.”
Now that the file is gone: History can apparently be swept under the rug like trash.
When a nation’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs voluntarily “emasculates” its strongest legal argument for sovereignty over Taiwan just to please a controversial “pro-Taiwan” scholar, what is that if not a mindset of betrayal? What is it if not a blatant betrayal of the Constitution and national sovereignty?
MOFA must explain to the entire nation: Was your “appropriate method” for the long-term interest of the country, or to clear a political obstacle? This act is equivalent to personally tearing the roof off your own house, allowing the enemy to walk straight in!
References
Footnotes
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Taiwan’s International Legal Status Legally Belongs to the Republic of China ↩
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The document ‘Taiwan’s International Legal Status Legally Belongs to the Republic of China’ disappears from the MOFA website. Is this William Lai’s first step toward Taiwan independence? ↩
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Regarding media inquiries by scholars questioning MOFA’s retention of the Ma-era ‘Position Paper on Taiwan’s International Legal Status,’ MOFA responds as follows ↩
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Who is Jiang Huang-chi? Unmasking the controversial scholar who led MOFA to ‘emasculate sovereignty’ ↩