cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/3201775
It is long past time for Taiwan again to be included in the United Nations. Reasons include the need to address growing military tensions in the Taiwan Strait and to acknowledge Taiwan’s thriving democracy and economic importance.
That economic importance includes Taiwan’s enormous role in global supply chains. It produces more than 90 percent of the world’s high-end semiconductors and a significant portion of the advanced chips that drive the artificial intelligence revolution. Moreover, half of the world’s seaborne trade passes through the Taiwan Strait. Peace and stability around Taiwan has promoted global prosperity.
Meanwhile, China continues to intensify its aggression against Taiwan. Its attempts to change the status quo across the Taiwan Strait and expand its authoritarian ideology throughout the Indo-Pacific region are a profound threat to peace and security all around the world.
In fact, it was sort of Taiwan’s own policies that came back to kick them in the butt. In 1971, they were still ruled by the dictorial KMT (which wouldn’t reform into a proper democracy until another two decades, give or take a few years).
More saliently, both the KMT-ruled Taiwan and the PRC claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China, with the islands of Taiwan officially part of China. There are still references in the Constitution of the ROC today, see Chapter IX, Article 91 of https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/94 or Article 120 under Chapter XI of the same page.
Also see Article 2, Paragraph 2 of https://law.moj.gov.tw/ENG/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?pcode=Q0010001#:~:text=No%20people%20of%20the%20Mainland,the%20purposes%20of%20the%20permission.
So what happened in the UN in 1971 is that the UN itself decided to switch representation of who is “China” from the government based in Taiwan to the one based in Beijing. Prior to that, it was the opposite situation - the ROC (Taiwan) held the UN seat of China, including the permanent membership of the Security Council and veto power.
Of course, a lot has changed since 1971, and what justifications were made then don’t necessarily still make sense now.