Losing the Seat: The UN and the Diplomatic Dominoes
Late in the evening of October 25, 1971, the United Nations General Assembly voted on Resolution 2758, tabled by Albania and others. Beforehand, the United States had introduced an "important question" motion requiring a two-thirds majority to expel the Republic of China; it was defeated fifty-five to fifty-nine. Once that line broke, the outcome was settled. Foreign Minister Chow Shu-kai rose before the formal vote was completed to announce that the Republic of China was withdrawing from the United Nations, and the delegation walked out. The resolution passed seventy-six to thirty-five, recognizing the People's Republic of China as the sole legitimate representative of China at the UN.
When the news reached Taipei, Chiang Kai-shek issued a message to the nation containing the phrase that would define the decade: remain dignified and self-reliant, unshaken in the face of change, careful in counsel and decisive in action. The words were printed on textbooks, posters, and matchboxes, and became the official emotional register of the 1970s.
The dominoes fell quickly. In February 1972 Nixon visited Beijing and signed the Shanghai Communiqué. That September, Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei established relations with the People's Republic and severed them with the Republic of China. Japan's reversal cut especially deep: it was among Taiwan's most important trading partners, and for many Taiwanese it was an inseparable part of their own life histories. The number of states maintaining diplomatic relations fell from more than sixty in 1970 to little over twenty by 1979.
The heaviest blow arrived in the pre-dawn hours of December 16, 1978, when Ambassador Leonard Unger woke Chiang Ching-ku…
The heaviest blow arrived in the pre-dawn hours of December 16, 1978, when Ambassador Leonard Unger woke Chiang Ching-kuo to inform him that President Carter would announce the establishment of relations with the People's Republic effective January 1, 1979, the severing of relations with the Republic of China, the termination of the Mutual Defense Treaty, and the withdrawal of American forces from Taiwan. The government suspended the supplementary national legislative elections then underway — a decision whose consequences far exceeded what anyone intended. The dangwai opposition, already mobilized and campaigning in the expectation of enlarging its foothold, abruptly lost the only legal arena it had, and its energy had nowhere to go but the street. Barely a year separated that suspension from the Kaohsiung Incident of December 1979.
In April 1979 the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, preserving substantive relations and defensive arms sales through domestic legislation. The act would become the load-bearing pillar of the relationship for decades — but at the time it did little to soften the shock of having been set down by an ally.
Paradoxically, this sequence of diplomatic defeats loosened the most solid ideological foundation the regime possessed at home. Once the international community no longer accepted that Taipei represented all of China, the doctrine of legitimate succession lost its external support, and people began to ask: if we are not China, then what are we. The Diaoyutai protest movement of 1971 and the Nativist Literature debate of 1977 were both forms of that question being asked aloud. Chiang Ching-kuo read the same signal and began a policy of localization, drawing Taiwanese figures such as Lin Yang-kang and Lee Teng-hui into the core of the system — a personnel adjustment made to secure the regime that turned out to be the opening move in its transformation.
The decade in which the state was struck from the world's registers was also the decade in which its society first thought seriously about who it was.
The moment the important-question motion failed fifty-five to fifty-nine, our side of the hall went quiet. Four votes. Twenty-two years of representation, short by four votes. Years later people would ask whether accepting dual representation earlier might have preserved the seat. In the Taipei of that time, the question could not be asked. The refusal to sit alongside Beijing was not a slogan; it was where the regime's legitimacy lived. If Beijing could also represent China, then what was this government on Taiwan? Our instructions were unambiguous throughout: the seat may be lost, the title may not be conceded. So the minister rose before the vote was completed to announce our withdrawal, and the delegation walked out of the chamber. In a situation where nothing else remained within our control, this was the one act still in our hands: not expelled, but departing. We all understood that the distinction meant nothing to the outside world. It meant something to us. Nobody could speak that evening. A colleague wept in the corridor. We knew what we had just left behind in that hall, and we knew that from the next morning this country would have to learn to exist in some other way — without a seat, without a title, with nothing but an island and the fifteen million people on it.
Isle of Time