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Few documents in modern diplomatic history have sown more confusion, distortion and injustice than General Assembly Resolution 2758.

Passed in the shadow of the Cold War on Oct. 25, 1971, the resolution was ostensibly designed to answer a straightforward question: Who should represent “�� at the ?

In truth, it did far more and far worse. It trampled over the Charter, abandoned legal principles for political convenience and laid the foundation for the People’s to wage a decades-long campaign of coercion against .

The resolution is not a triumph of diplomacy; it’s a vivid reminder of how the machinery of international law can be hijacked by raw geopolitical manipulation and diplomatic incompetence.

Resolution 2758’s most glaring flaw lies in its procedural illegitimacy.

The Charter, the organization’s very rulebook, makes clear in Article 6 that the expulsion of a member state requires a prior recommendation from the more powerful Security Council before any General Assembly action. No such recommendation was made. Moreover, Article 18(2) categorizes issues of membership, suspension and expulsion as “important questions�� necessitating a two-thirds majority. Yet the resolution was falsely classified as a routine, non-important matter and passed with only a simple majority, led by the resolution’s chief sponsor, Albania, another communist dictatorship.

This wasn’t a clerical error. It was a deliberate circumvention of legal norms by the resolution’s supporters. Their goal was political, not procedural: to replace the (ROC in ) with the PRC at the without the legal burden of following the charter’s requirements.

What should have been a carefully adjudicated process became a legal farce.

The wording of Resolution 2758 is as cunning as it is dangerous. It solved only the question of PRC’s representation in the ; it said nothing about status or international representation. It did not even mention .

Nor did it ever affirm the PRC’s sovereignty over the island. It merely recognized the PRC as “the only lawful representatives of to the �� and expelled “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek.��

This deliberately ambiguous language left a vacuum into which Beijing has poured its propaganda. This semantic ambiguity was done by design, making it a Trojan horse for authoritarian power.

The PRC has since falsely asserted that the resolution constitutes international endorsement of its claim over , a false narrative that U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican, have repeatedly repudiated.

However, Beijing has brandished Resolution 2758 like a cudgel in multilateral forums, including the World Health Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization, insisting that has no right to even observe, let alone participate.

This is a distortion of the resolution’s meaning and international legal standards. The resolution decided only who gets seat; it said nothing about sovereignty or right to participate independently.

Resolution 2758 did not emerge from a deliberative process rooted in law or justice. It was the byproduct of Cold War realignment. In the early 1970s, President Nixon, guided by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s secret diplomacy, sought rapprochement with the PRC to, first and foremost, assist the U.S. out of the quagmire in Vietnam, proxy state in Southeast Asia at the time, and second, to counterbalance Soviet influence.

, officially known as the , a long-standing ally of the United States and a founding member, was cast aside in the interest of grand strategy.

George H.W. Bush, then U.S. ambassador to the , stood by as the flagrantly procedurally flawed resolution gained momentum in the U.N. General Assembly. The future American president, paralyzed by conflicting instructions from Washington and the inertia of global bloc politics, completely failed to use U.S. veto power in the more powerful U.N. Security Council to stop the train wreck. This blunder became one of the most humiliating and consequential in U.S. diplomatic history.

In the end, votes in the General Assembly were not based on legal merits or questions of self-determination, but on ideological allegiance and diplomatic horse-trading.

In this environment, became a casualty of Cold War pragmatism, sacrificed on the altar of expedience.

The result has remained disastrous. What was initially framed as a matter of administrative representation has since been weaponized. The PRC now uses Resolution 2758 to bar from international organizations and to isolate and punish any country that dares recognize legitimacy.

This is not the work of a responsible international stakeholder. It is the behavior of a regime bent on rewriting history through intimidation.
exclusion from bodies such as the WHO is a political and humanitarian injustice.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, exclusion deprived the world of valuable expertise and cooperation. The 23 million citizens of are being punished for the crime of existing as a free, democratic and self-governing society.

Despite the legal and political war waged against it, endures as a de facto sovereign state. Since the late 1990s, has essentially abandoned any attempt to seek the right to represent “�� internationally. It simply wants to represent itself in international space. Successive Taiwanese administrations have rightly said that has no need to “declare�� independence. It already is an independent country, and its official name is the in .

Year after year, poll after poll, an overwhelming majority of Taiwanese people endorse this de facto independence as status quo. The only question is whether the international community will have the courage to recognize that reality.

In fact, meets all the requirements of being a fully functional, sovereign country. It has its own government, military, constitution and borders. It conducts foreign affairs, trades globally and upholds democratic norms. Its people overwhelmingly identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese.

It is, by every practical measure, a nation.

If using global good citizenship as a measurement, is more qualified than to enjoy full membership in the international community of nations.

Resolution 2758 is not a sacred text to be revered. It is a broken instrument forged in political haste, steeped in legal irregularity and wielded today as a tool of oppression. It deserves neither celebration nor obedience; it deserves repudiation.

If the wishes to reclaim its credibility as a guardian of peace, justice and international law, it must confront the uncomfortable truth: Resolution 2758 was a betrayal of the Charter, of , of the principles the was founded to uphold.

The time has come to relegate this Cold War relic to the dustbin of history and to stand with not as a pawn in a geopolitical game, but as a legitimate and equal member of the community of nations.

The world owes more than polite silence. It owes clarity, courage and justice. That begins by calling Resolution 2758 what it truly is: a fraud.