China, Taiwan, and Japan: The Politics of Amnesia

War, legitimacy, and the transfer of China’s state representation

Kazuhiro Hayashida reveals how war, recognition, and international power decided who speaks for China.

During the war, China was divided into three parts: Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Japanese government in Chongqing, Wang Jingwei’s pro-Japanese government in Nanjing, and the Communist Party. The Nanjing government was an ally of Japan and fought alongside it, even declaring war on the United States and Britain. Japan, in turn, recognized the Nanjing government as a state, and its head, Chen Gongbo, was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun.

However, when Japan was defeated, the Nanjing government was defeated by Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Japanese forces. Regrettably, among the personnel of the pro-Japanese Nanjing government, its top leadership—including Chen Gongbo—were executed or purged by the Chiang Kai-shek regime. Meanwhile, some of the local officials, police, security forces, and military personnel who had served under the Nanjing government were excluded by Chiang Kai-shek’s government as collaborators with Japan. At the same time, in the eyes of the Communist Party, they were categorized as people who did not fight in the war against Japan, yet were anti-Chiang.

As a result, part of this excluded practical and administrative stratum was absorbed by the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war period, which ultimately led to its victory in the Chinese Civil War.

As a basis for claiming that the anti-Japanese Chongqing government was a victorious power, it is often pointed out that by suppressing the pro-Japanese Nanjing government, the Chongqing government of the Republic of China gained the upper hand in the war against Japan. More decisively, Chiang Kai-shek’s Chongqing government fought Japan as a member of the Allied Powers and took charge of postwar settlement, thereby being recognized internationally as a victorious power. Within the international community, however, disputes concerning the legitimacy of the permanent member status were divided into two issues.

The first was who represents the state of China, and the second was who holds China’s seat at the United Nations.

From the 1950s to the 1960s, Western countries—especially the United States—supported the Republic of China (Taiwan) within the Cold War framework and allowed it to continue holding China’s seat at the United Nations.

Yet this situation was a provisional one maintained by political dynamics rather than legal principle, since it was the People’s Republic of China that actually governed the Chinese mainland and functioned as the entity with population, military power, and diplomatic capacity.

By the late 1960s, with the rise of non-aligned and Third World countries and the rapprochement between the United States and China against the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet split, the majority of the international community gradually leaned towards recognizing that the representative of China is the People’s Republic of China. The decisive moment came with United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2758, adopted at the 26th session of the General Assembly in 1971.

This resolution recognized the People’s Republic of China as the sole legitimate representative of China and decided to expel the representatives of the Republic of China (Taiwan) from the United Nations.

An important point is that this resolution did not newly grant permanent membership; rather, it took the form of transferring the existing Chinese representative status from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China. In other words, the permanent seat moved.

As a result, the victorious-power status derived from the Chongqing government and the authority of permanent membership on the Security Council were formally transferred to the People’s Republic of China on the premise of the continuity of China as a state. From that point on, Taiwan ceased—both within the United Nations and under international law—to be the entity representing China and completely lost its status as a permanent member.

The crucial point is that the sequence Chongqing government → Republic of China → People’s Republic of China was treated not as a continuity of regimes, but as a continuity of state representation. The transfer of permanent-member authority must therefore be interpreted as the outcome of the international community giving a final answer to the question, “Who is the effective governing authority of the state called China?” In this respect, China’s permanent-member status has been consistently justified, both legally and politically, up to the present day.

Postwar settlement after the transition was also carried out by the Communist government, and diplomatic relations were normalized during the time of Kakuei Tanaka.¹ By recognizing the People’s Republic of China as the legitimate subject and victorious power, the previously unresolved postwar state of Sino-Japanese relations reached a provisional conclusion.

Yet today it remains a mystery why Japan aligns itself with Taiwan, which traces its lineage to Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Japanese Chongqing government.

Such incomprehensible behavior by Japanese people is emotionally unacceptable to the People’s Republic of China, and the inability to answer the question—why Japan sides with Taiwan—has itself become a matter of international puzzlement.​

(Translated from the Japanese)

1. Translator’s note: Kakuei Tanaka (1918–1993) was the Japanese prime minister who normalized diplomatic relations between Japan and the People’s Republic of China in 1972, formally concluding the postwar rupture in Sino-Japanese relations.