My Take | Taiwan opposition brave to reject distortion of key UN resolution
Lawmakers from Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party show courage in walking out on DPP’s motion, which effectively denies ‘one China’
Taiwan’s leader William Lai Ching-te and his Western backers seem to confuse kindergarten wordplays with grand international politics and the bullying of the opposition as democracy.
The Kuomintang (KMT) lives and dies by one China, though it might interpret it differently from Beijing. That’s the basis of the 1992 Consensus, which the DPP has rejected. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has been much more flexible on the question.
But for both parties to submit to the DPP claim that Resolution 2758 means only mainland China and does not refer to Taiwan – an exercise in extreme sophistry if ever there was one – would have been political suicide.
In fact, over the years, there was a global consensus on the “one China” meaning of the resolution. It’s only recently that some Western politicians, many from Washington, and DPP supporters have begun exploiting the resolution as a stealthy means for the island to worm its way towards secession without an open declaration. But to date, no Western government has formally, on record, endorsed the DPP’s position.
Parliamentarians are a different matter. The US House of Representatives last year passed the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, claiming that the UN resolution did not refer to the island. The Australian Senate and the Netherlands’ House of Representatives passed similar motions.
