Getting ‘International Recognition’ of Taiwan Right Before It’s Too Late

PO1 Tony Holland thanks for sharing.

..."Qin’s letter on March 15 was just the latest in a decades-long CCP campaign to establish a legitimizing pretext for an armed attack against neighboring Taiwan. The PRC bolsters its preferred framing of what it calls the “Taiwan problem” within a highly legalistic reading of the constitutive theory of international relations according to which a state exists if other states recognize it. As a correlative, the PRC ignores the declarative theory of international law under which a state exists as an international legal person if it possesses a defined territory, a permanent population, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. Under the declarative theory, Taiwan much more easily meets the elements of statehood than many other widely recognized states. Taiwan’s constitutional liberal-democratic government of exercises indisputable sovereign authority over a well-defined territory and is the recognized government of about 24 million people. It conducts sophisticated diplomacy through “representative offices” and “embassies” throughout the world. The fact that Taiwan is de facto recognized as a state separate from the PRC by almost all the free countries of the world has contorted the PRC into an odd position."