The Vatican’s AsiaNews reported on ROC President Ma Ying-jeou’s East China Sea peace initiative Nov. 13 in Italian, Chinese and English under the headline “Taiwan proposes ‘sharing’ the Diaoyu/Senkaku to avoid tensions.”
Ma called for dialogue to resolve disputes over the Diaoyutai Archipelago, as the island chain is known in Taiwan, proposing that “sovereignty is a concept that by its very nature is indivisible; for this reason, in this case it must be set aside in favor of a common sharing of the archipelago’s resources,” the article said.
The islands were discovered and inhabited by Chinese during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the story pointed out, but after World War II the U.S. handed their administration over to Japan, despite the Cairo and Potsdam declarations.
The Diaoyutais have always had strategic and military importance, but in the 1960s U.S. experts found petroleum and natural gas deposits in the surrounding seabed, after which mainland China claimed the territory, according to the article.
Ma called on Beijing and Tokyo to abandon sovereignty disputes and work together on a code of conduct for the joint development and sharing of resources, saving “valuable assets for all without going to damaging extremes,” the story said.
Perry Pei-hwang Shen, director-general of the Department of Treaty and Legal Affairs with the ROC Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told AsiaNews that Ma’s proposal is “the only way to proceed in a meaningful way.”
Under the peace initiative, Shen said, excessive responses by individual parties can be avoided, and a situation where everyone loses can be turned into a winning situation one.
AsiaNews is an official press agency under the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions. (THN)