The True Shame of the ROC's Lost UN Seat
Thursday October 06, by Jerome F. Keating Ph.D.
For the Republic of China (ROC) October 25, 1971 was a day of infamy. On that day, its world came tumbling down as the nations of the world rejected the legitimacy of its claim to rule China. With a vote of 55 for and 59 against and 15 abstentions, the countries of the United Nations (UN) decided that the “I"Important Question" rule did not apply to the credentials of who represented the people of China. Up until this time, the United States and the ROC had by this“i"Important question" designation required that any changes in membership would need a two-thirds majority vote. This was a vote requirement that their dwindling majority of supporters could still use to keep the ROC in the UN. Now however, the end was near. Once this designation was lost, the UN members by a simple majority could vote to oust the Republic of China; and so, rather than be kicked out, the Republic of China withdrew from the United Nations.
Two key technicalities were evident. By focusing on credentials instead of membership, the proposal made by Albania could circumvent any veto. If the vote had been one of direct membership for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), then either the ROC or the United States could have used its Security Council veto to deny membership. The ROC had used this veto in 1955 when it refused to admit the People’s Republic of Mongolia. It did this on the grounds that Mongolia was part of the Republic of China. In 1960 Russia challenged this unrealistic claim of the ROC and threatened to retaliate by vetoing all in-coming African nations to expose it. The ROC backed off and Mongolia came in. (In an ironic twist of history those same African states would line up on the side of the PRC over the ROC.) The second technicality was in the ROC's departure; the ROC could always say it chose to leave and technically left--before it was kicked out.
While many in the West felt it was a shame that the ROC, one of the founding members of the UN, should receive such "ignominious" treatment, for anyone who had watched the increasing erosion of support for the ROC from the 1950s on, it was inevitable and only a matter of time.
The real shame, however, was not in the UN deciding that the PRC, a country with over one quarter of the world’s population should be allowed entrance to the UN. To deny it membership was unrealistic. The real shame was in the continued hoax that was perpetuated on the people of Taiwan. To grasp this one must follow the chain of events.
Taiwan was an unsettled question after World War II, even in the San Francisco Treaty that went into effect in 1952. Intelligentsia of Taiwan had petitioned for the right to join the UN as Taiwan after the war but this had been denied and/or forestalled by the US giving custodianship to the ROC. Keeping matters vague gave the US more options but it also created more problems. This would come back to haunt all.
Many point to the changing numbers in the ROC’s loss of UN support. As more and more third world and non-western countries entered the UN, they chose to recognize the PRC rather than the ROC as the true China. There is no denying this; the numbers were working against the ROC. From the 1950s when twice as many countries recognized the ROC as did the PRC, those numbers dropped until in the mid 60s when the ROC had only a ten country advantage. By 1971 the numbers favoring each were drawing dead even and tilting to the PRC.
One fact that is often neglected, however, is that by this time many western countries had already come to terms with the reality of the PRC over the ROC and that even the US was telegraphing its coming change in recognition.
Go back as far as January 6, 1950. Less than four months after Mao Tse-tung declared the People’s Republic of China in October 1949, the United Kingdom recognized the PRC and established diplomatic relations. Switzerland followed (1950) as did the four Scandinavian countries (1950--1954). In 1964, both France and Italy recognized the PRC. Thus by the end of 1964, many European countries and three of the five countries on the Security Council had officially recognized the PRC.
In 1966, Italy proposed that the United Nations settle the "two China" issue in its forum. Both the PRC and the ROC rejected this, each for their own reasons, but in hindsight, this would have been the time for the ROC to get an advantageous settlement. The ROC still had a ten vote majority among member states, and as was seen above the hand was writing on the wall in its dwindling support.
The US position was now also changing. In 1969, Richard Nixon had become President of the United States. Despite his strong anti-Communist reputation Nixon had written in 1967 that it was unrealistic for the nations of the world to not recognize and deal with the PRC. A few years later, in a 1970 interview with Time magazine, Nixon was also quoted as saying that if there was anything he wanted to do before he died, it was "to go to China." In April 1971, the American ping-pong team which was in Japan for the World Table Tennis Championship matches received a surprise invitation from PRC Premier Chou En-lai to visit China. They accepted and immediately went to China with several journalists. Later known as Ping-Pong Diplomacy, this surprise invitation and acceptance would provide a publicly acceptable ice-breaker between the PRC and the US.
In July of 1971, Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing to lay the groundwork for a proposed visit by Nixon to China. He would be back in Beijing on a second trip in October of 1971 when the crucial vote came up in the United Nations. Thus at what turned out to be the showdown vote, the US National Security Advisor was away finalizing Nixon’s upcoming trip to China (the "enemy") and George Bush Senior was left holding the fort at the UN.
What about the dual representation issue? As was said, in hindsight, for the Kuomintang (KMT) who ruled Taiwan under martial law and as a one party state, the ideal time to gain this would have been by supporting Italy’s proposal in 1966. At this time, the PRC was not a member and had less clout. After 1971, the PRC could insist that there only be "one China." The people of Taiwan of course had no say.
The US had floated the dual recognition idea again in early 1971 and the then ROC foreign minister Chou Shu-kai had let it be known to the ROC’s allies that it would be open to accepting it. Chou stipulated however that this was private knowledge and that the ROC could not let it be known back home that it openly supported dual recognition.
Retired ROC ambassador Loh I-cheng’s recollection differs slightly; he remembers that the official approval for dual representation was finally given by Chiang Kai-shek at the last minute on the last day and after all other options had failed. Both positions are possible since Chiang could let matters be discussed and keep the final say for himself. Regardless, it was only a matter of time that the ROC would lose its seat. Loh and Frederick Chien who was Director General of the Department of North American Affairs question whether the ROC could have held its seat too much longer even if it had withstood the challenge of October 25, 1971.
On February 27, 1972, the United States would issue the Shanghai Communique with the PRC; this was the very same communiquethat Kissinger and Chou En-lai had been drafting back when the UN vote was being taken in October 1971. By the communique the US and China agreed to disagree on what was one China, but the communique did make "One China" part of future US parlance. In typical fashion, the US was vague on what one China meant and how that related to Taiwan.
Kissinger's trademark Machiavellian willingness to neglect and disregard the rights and concerns of other countries and peoples to achieve his ends may come as a surprise to some. So eager were Kissinger and Nixon to make their mark in history that in the wording of the communiquethey were willing to concede more than they needed. Here, even Secretary of State William Rogers and the US State Department were kept in the dark on the text of the communiqueuntil the last minute and they protested its wording and how it ignored Taiwan.
The real shame of the October UN vote however still lay deeper. It is found in the often unexplored matter of why and how the ROC had been able to tell its allies that it could privately live with a two China settlement, but did not want to let this policy to be known back in Taiwan. One must explore why the ROC wanted to maintain this duplicity and whether the ROC’s allies did not grasp what this meant or whether they ignored it.
The ROC as a one party state of the Kuomintang (KMT) was no model of democracy. It had been ruthless in gaining and trying to hold power in China and it was more so when it came to Taiwan. As an implant on Taiwan after the war, the KMT could no longer deny the people of Taiwan the right to participation in government if there were "two Chinas." The hoax of the KMT’s claim to Taiwan depended on refusing to publicly admit that there could be two Chinas. Chiang Kai-shek’s megalomaniacal image of being the savior of China could also not withstand such an admission.
While the rest of the world was acknowledging the PRC, the people in Taiwan unfortunately had no idea of what was going on. Here where the KMT controlled the media, the schools, and the police force, the people were being told it was the rest of the world that was deceived. Only by maintaining the illusion that there was one China and KMT was its rightful heir could they claim their legitimacy to rule in Taiwan.
Examine the consequences of why the KMT could not admit that China was not theirs, that there could be two Chinas, or even could be one China and one Taiwan. With no claim to legitimacy, the KMT/ROC had no justification for maintaining martial law, no justification to maintain a one party state, and no justification for disallowing elections at a national level. With no claim to legitimacy, the KMT/ROC had no justification for keeping the Legislative Yuan (originally 760 members representing all the provinces of China) on the payroll, no justification to keep all the state assets it had seized, and no right to continue political arrests. The list goes on and on pointing out why the KMT could not publicly admit to "two Chinas" and thus free elections at home.
This is what really went down in October 1971. We are not talking about the confusion of a few years after WWII until legitimacy was sorted out. The ramifications of the great hoax become all the stronger when one realizes how much time had already passed (twenty-five years since the end of WWII), and how much time would have to pass until Taiwan became a democracy (another twenty-five years--1996). The Kaohsiung Incident (1979) would still be eight years away. It would be another sixteen years before martial law would finally end (1987). It would be another twenty plus years before the ROC would officially say that the Civil War it lost in 1949 was over (1992). It would be 1996 before the people of Taiwan could finally choose their own president.
There are numerous other issues to be sorted out here. Certainly in hindsight, no one questions that to deny the PRC entry into the UN in the 50s and 60s was unrealistic and wrong, but one wrong is not corrected by another. Hindsight also points to the UN’s ongoing mistreatment of the reality of Taiwan and Taiwan’s long struggle for recognition. As a viable democracy of twenty-three million people, Taiwan should not be a ping-pong ball.
Taiwan is a democracy with a population larger than 75% of the countries in the UN. Ironically under the principle of self-determination in the UN Charter, the island nation of Tuvalu (population 11,000 compared to Taiwan’s 23,000,000) recently entered the UN, yet Taiwan is still denied entry. The shame of 1971 is not in the loss of the ROC’s UN seat, but rather in how it points out that the people of Taiwan were denied entry into the UN in 1950, in 1971 and even now.