Taiwan rejects PRC's 'restoration' narrative: Competing sovereignty claims mask Indigenous erasure and unresolved post-WWII settlement
Original framing: “Taiwan rebuffs China's commemorations for post-World War Two 'restoration' of island - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
Indigenous Austronesian nations (Pangcah/Amis, Tayal/Atayal, Paiwan, etc.) never consented to Japanese annexation (1895), ROC 'retrocession' (1945), or PRC claims. The 2016 Indigenous Historical Justice and Transitional Justice Commission documented land dispossession, forced assimilation, and cultural genocide under both Japanese and KMT regimes. Contemporary Indigenous leaders like Mayaw Biho and Ciwang Teyra frame Taiwan's status through 'shared sovereignty' models rooted in pre-colonial inter-tribal diplomacy — not state-centric treaties. The PRC's 'restoration' commemorations erase this by subsuming Indigenous lands into 'Chinese territory since antiquity' narratives.
The 'restoration' commemoration is not a historical dispute but a live legal weapon: Beijing uses the ROC's 1945 acceptance of Japanese surrender — a surrender the PRC never received — to construct a sovereignty claim that erases both the 1951 treaty's ambiguity and Indigenous nations' prior sovereignty.
The KMT's 'retrocession' narrative enabled 38 years of martial law; the CCP's 'restoration' narrative enables current coercion. Both are Han settler-colonial stories. The systemic solution lies not in choosing between PRC and ROC frameworks but in the Austronesian-led plurinational movements already building constitutional alternatives grounded in 'lima' (relational skill) and 'pacavalj' (ancestral accountability). International law's 'undetermined status' is not a vacuum — it is an opening for self-determination that includes, for the first time, the peoples who were here before either Chinese regime.