In his essay “The Normalization of Japan-China Relations Was a Mistake,” Mineo Nakajima, president of Akita International University, examines the U.S.-China rapprochement, the 1971 United Nations China representation question, the Albanian Resolution, Taiwan’s departure from the United Nations, and Japan’s diplomatic response. Nakajima argues that these events embodied a major error by the postwar international community.

August 12, 2020
The following is from an essay by Mineo Nakajima, president of Akita International University, published in a Hanada magazine selection under the title “The Normalization of Japan-China Relations Was a Mistake.”
【Originally published in the October 2012 issue of WiLL, edited by Kazuyoshi Hanada】
This is an essay that should be read not only by the Japanese people, but by people throughout the world.
【A Major Mistake by the International Community】
The end of the Second World War should, in principle, have brought peace to the world.
Yet even today, in what is called the age of globalization, wars and conflicts continue to break out throughout the world.
In postwar Asia, the Korean War and the Vietnam War brought profound tragedies.
In Europe, the suffering of Eastern Europe and the division between East and West symbolized by the Berlin Wall emerged, while conflicts continue in many parts of the world even today.
That the coming of the postwar world did not bring peace and stability to the world is evident simply from looking at the more recent situation in the Middle East.
Indeed, as Professor Samuel Huntington predicted in the early 1990s in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, provoking major debate in international intellectual circles, the twenty-first century may truly be described as an age of a “clash of civilizations.”
At that time Huntington used the phrase “The Confucian-Islamic Connection” and suggested that authoritarian Confucian states, namely North Korea and China, together with Islamic fundamentalist states connected with them, including Libya, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan, could become problem states threatening world peace.
It was an exceptionally perceptive observation.
Amid such upheaval in international society, the Cold War structure between the United States and the Soviet Union, which existed like a massive vein running through the postwar world, and the Sino-Soviet split, a serious conflict within the socialist bloc that continued from the 1960s through the 1980s, exerted an enormous impact on the realities of international politics.
Under the Nixon administration, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger made his secret visit to Beijing in July 1971, followed by President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in February 1972.
These events shocked the world and produced what came to be known as the U.S.-China rapprochement.
Looking back calmly from today’s perspective, however, it was made possible by an extremely skillful diplomatic choice on the part of China, which at the time was in bitter conflict with the Soviet Union.
Within China, meanwhile, an extremely serious struggle within the Communist Party and for political power took place, and I regard the Lin Biao incident as its culmination.
For the United States, the strategic-arms balance with the Soviet Union was becoming increasingly serious, while the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT, were not progressing smoothly.
The United States and China therefore came to share, in effect, the principle that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
China acquired legitimate international standing, however, because in the autumn of 1971, the year before the Nixon visit, the United Nations General Assembly adopted by majority vote the so-called Albanian Resolution, which seated the People’s Republic of China at the United Nations and removed the Republic of China on Taiwan.
It is precisely here, however, that we must recognize a grave mistake committed by the international community.
【Japan Did Not Defend Taiwan】
First, let us look back at the actual condition and international position of Albania at that time.
Albania was a small Eastern European country under a one-party Communist dictatorship headed by the Albanian Party of Labour.
The oppressive rule of the dictator Enver Hoxha extended throughout the country, and all religion was prohibited.
Moreover, during the Sino-Soviet dispute that began in the early 1960s, the Albanian Party of Labour, under First Secretary Hoxha, an admirer of Mao Zedong, consistently played what amounted to the role of an agent of the Chinese Communist Party.
It treated the Soviet Union as an enemy and attacked the socialism of neighboring Yugoslavia as “revisionism.”
After the collapse of the socialist regimes brought about by democratization in Eastern Europe, Albania suffered severe economic turmoil, and its people continued to endure serious hardship.
China had consistently supported Albania, using it not only in efforts to build a majority within the international communist movement but also to the fullest extent in building support at the United Nations, particularly among non-aligned countries.
One should therefore have asked whether such an Albania was qualified to sponsor a resolution that would seat China in the United Nations and give it a permanent seat as one of the five major powers.
Yet international society, in a period of profound global change, had lost the capacity to make such a judgment.
Moreover, whatever the authoritarian nature of the Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang Ching-kuo governments, the Republic of China on Taiwan had been one of the victorious powers of the Second World War and a founding member of the United Nations, holding a permanent seat on the Security Council.
The fact that the Albanian Resolution removing Taiwan from the United Nations was adopted by a majority exceeding half of the then 131 UN member states must, in my view, be regarded as a major mistake.
The United States had prepared a “dual representation” resolution intended to keep Taiwan in the United Nations, but the adoption of the Albanian Resolution meant that it never came to a vote.
Japan was not only a member of the United Nations but also had deeper ties with Taiwan than virtually any other member state and still maintained formal diplomatic relations with it.
Nevertheless, Japan took no part in efforts to defend Taiwan’s position.
Thus the government in Taiwan at the time, namely the government of the Republic of China, was compelled to withdraw from the United Nations.
There was, of course, a problem in that Taiwan at the time still relied on the fiction that the Republic of China governed and represented all of China.
The eventual emergence of President Lee Teng-hui in the late 1980s, explicitly advancing the “Taiwanization of the Republic of China,” could not then have been foreseen.
As a result, a polity that, viewed globally, possesses the standing of an established middle-ranking state and is unmistakably a state in political, economic, diplomatic, military and educational terms—and which, in terms of democratization, has become a democracy that people on the Chinese mainland might envy—exists with 23 million mature citizens while possessing only a tenuous basis of legitimacy within international society.
Japanese diplomacy, too, has borne part of the responsibility for this great mistake.
To be continued.