No Man's Land

"Let's talk of practical matters," said Nationalist China's foreign minister recently in reply to a question about the legal status of Formosa. "There has never been any legal question about who has Formosa and to who Formosa beings . . . Japan surrendered the island to us." Actually he was stating only one of the many sides to a legal problem which has threatened to split the United States and its allies.

The first attempt to define China's post-war relation to Formosa was made at Cairo in 1943, when Britain, Nationalist China and the United States agreed that "all territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as . . . Formosa and the Pescadores shall be restored to the Republic of China." Since the Chinese had ceded Formosa and the Pescadores to Japan in a treaty at the end of the nineteenth century, the formal transfer of these islands had to await to Japanese peace treaty. No major power objected, however, when Chiang Kai-shek's forces occupied the island in 1945 and established the Nationalist government there.

Agreement on the future of Formosa lasted only as long as Chiang Kai-shek held control of the mainland of China. Once the Nationalists were pushed from the mainland in 1949, the Chinese Communists asserted their claims to Formosa and argued that the parties to the Cairo Declaration had intended the island to go the effective rulers of China. A bizarre series of debates followed in which both Russians and Nationalist Chinese accepted the Cairo agreements. Each contended that Formosa belonged to a different China.

The problem re-emerged in even more complex for after the signing of the Japanese peace treaty in 1951. Japan gave up all legal claim to Formosa, but the treaty was silent as to the rightful ownership of the island. In its preliminary statement on the treaty, the Soviet Union cited the Cairo Declaration to claim that Formosa belonged to Communist China. In reply, the United States suggested that an international conference should decide the fate of Formosa, since the Cairo Declaration must be "subject to a fixed peace settlement where all relevant factors should be considered." Great Britain offered still a third plan. Although the British government recognized "changes of conditions and atmosphere" in the Far East, it accepted the Russian argument, in effect, and agreed that Red China should eventually receive Formosa under the Cairo agreements. For the immediate future, however, Britain suggested a UN Trusteeship over Formosa.

In reply to a query by the Soviet government, John Foster Dulles frankly explained why the Japanese peace treaty had left the status of Formosa undetermined. "As regards Formosa, the differences of opinion are such that it could not be definitely dealt with by a Japanese peace treaty to which the Allied powers as a whole are parties," he said. Today formal control over Formosa remains in the hands of the nations which signed the Japanese peace treaty. Power politics, rather than legal arguments, will probably determine the ultimate status of Formosa. Until then, no single nation has legal sovereignty over the island.