Editor’s note:

One of the most complicated issues in contemporary international relations is the status of the self-governing island of Taiwan and its government in Taipei, formally called the government of the Republic of China (ROC). Is Taiwan a sovereign state? Who gets to decide? What is the legal relationship between the ROC and the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? How much of US support for Taiwan is grounded in law and how much in policy? Does international law recognize Taiwan’s right of self-defense or the right of its friends to come to its aid?

During 2024-2025, the U.S.-Asia Law Institute (USALI) hosted a series of speakers to address these and related questions from different perspectives. In this Feb. 13, 2025 talk, Jacques deLisle, a professor of law and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, unpacks the debate over the 1971 United Nations General Assembly vote that took the “China seat” at the UN away from the ROC government on Taiwan and gave it to the government of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing. Professor deLisle says the UN General Assembly did not and could not decide whether Taiwan is a state or merely part of the PRC. The General Assembly simply decided that the PRC government was the actual government of “China,” whatever China’s borders might be.

Professor deLisle’s detailed analysis can be found in a 2024 report that he co-authored with Bonnie S. Glaser titled: “Why UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 Does Not Establish Beijing’s ‘One China’ Principle: A Legal Perspective.”

The following excerpts from the 2025 talk have been edited lightly for clarity and brevity. A full recording of the program can be found here. The discussion was moderated by Katherine Wilhelm, executive director of the US-Asia Law Institute.

Professor deLisle began by asking why the UN is relevant to a conversation about Taiwan’s international legal status.

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By Jacques deLisle

The United Nations is the paradigmatic state member-only organization, such that membership or presence in the UN correlates with state status. Of course, it's not quite true that statehood and UN membership will line up perfectly. Switzerland, undisputedly a state, for a long time was not in the UN. The Soviet Union actually had three seats for a while: Byelorussia, Ukraine, and USSR were there. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good indicator.

The loss of UN presence for the Republic of China (ROC) was the beginning of the diplomatic unraveling that has now reached the point where the ROC has only a dozen formal partners. Beijing has increasingly made the UN and particularly UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 – the resolution that moved the Chinese seat from Taipei to Beijing at the UN – a centerpiece of its arguments about Taiwan's status, particularly its international legal status. ...

Exclusion from the UN strikes at one of the four pillars of statehood under international law. Territory, population, autonomous governance – Taiwan ticks all those boxes easily. Taiwan has robust informal international relations, but the formal dimension of the capacity to engage in international relations is vulnerable. Keeping Taiwan out of the UN is one way of chipping away at that foundation.

Much of the battle over Taiwan's international legal status is ultimately about the permissibility of actions that Beijing might take to achieve unification, perhaps by force, and the permissibility of intervention or assistance by the US and other outsiders to back Taiwan or prevent unconsented unification.

Much of the battle over Taiwan's international legal status is ultimately about the permissibility of actions that Beijing might take to achieve unification.

So the UN is very much at the center of this. And the UN has also been a favorable arena for China to pursue its agenda. It's one state, one vote. That means it's mostly global South states, and those states tend to back China. ...

There are few parts to the story of the UN and Taiwan's international status. At the core is UN General Assembly Resolution 2758. A longstanding piece of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) argument, which got special emphasis in its 2022 White Paper, says the resolution “settled once and for all the political, legal, and procedural issues of China's representation in the UN, and it covered the whole country, including Taiwan.” The White Paper says the resolution “is a political document encapsulating the one-China principle whose legal authority leaves no room for doubt, and has been acknowledged worldwide.”

Pretty strong stuff. Does 2758 do that? It’s kind of hard to say that it lines up with that characterization. What 2758 does is purport to restore the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China. It recognizes the representatives of the government of the PRC as the only lawful representatives of China to the UN.

It doesn't address the question of Taiwan's status, whether it's a part or not a part of China. It doesn't mention the word “Taiwan.” ... And the PRC did not at the time think 2758 settled the question.

It doesn't address the question of Taiwan's status, whether it's a part or not a part of China. It doesn't mention the word “Taiwan.”

Here is a little international law nerd stuff. China is a state. It was a state under the Qing dynasty. It's still the state of China under the ROC [during the twentieth century], and it's still the state of China under the PRC. ... You've basically got a new government taking over. And so the question was credentialing representatives of which government to hold the Chinese seat.

It's been, by the way, the longstanding position of the UN as a matter of law - dating as far back as a 1950 opinion from the secretary general and other things done by the legal officers in the Secretariat - that says the UN has no role in recognizing states or governments. Those are matters for individual member states of the UN to decide for themselves. It would be transgressing the sovereign powers of member states for the UN to purport to do that. ...

The UN also lacks the authority to settle disputes over territorial sovereignty. Is a disputed area part of one state or another, or its own state? {The UN] doesn't have that authority. It's not an international legislature and it's not an international court. The International Court of Justice has settled territorial sovereignty questions, but only with the consent of the parties to jurisdiction. In short, if you buy China's characterization, then the UN General Assembly must have acted ultra vires if it tried to resolve the question of Taiwan’s status.

On to the next couple of acts in this story. China’s 2022 White Paper cites for the first time ever in a PRC document, as far as I know, an Office of Legal Affairs (OLA) memorandum from the UN. This is the principal legal body within the Secretariat's office. The White Paper states: “It was clearly stated in the official legal opinions of the OLA that ‘the United Nations considers “Taiwan” as a province of China, with no separate status,’ and the ‘authorities’ in ‘Taipei’ are not considered to enjoy any form of government status. At the UN, the island is referred to as ‘Taiwan, Province of China.’”

That is pretty strong stuff. But as a legal matter, the OLA memo does less than it appears. It does cite 2758 as its basis. But it came in the context of a rather narrow issue. China objected to Nauru, which was then a diplomatic ally of Taiwan, submitting a report to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, thanking the ROC (Taiwan) for its assistance in preparing the report and its progress on human rights. The OLA memo rejected any requirement that documents not created by the Secretariat, but rather submitted by member states, had to have any particular nomenclature [about Taiwan]. Indeed, the memo states the practice of the UN when circulating a document for a member state has been to reproduce the document as it has been received. ...

Installment three in our drama are statements from UN sources that say the UN considers Taiwan for all intents and purposes to be a part or an integral part of China or the PRC, and linking those again to 2758. This began in the days of [ROC President] Lee Teng-hui, when, in the early 1990s, Taiwan started to seek to re-engage and get some sort of representation at the UN. ...

What happened in the context of this bid in 2007 ... is that [then-UN Secretary General] Ban Ki-moon, when asked at a press conference about an application for Taiwan's membership submitted by diplomatic allies, said: The matter about which you asked was carefully considered by the Secretariat, and in light of Resolution 2758, it was not legally possible to receive the purported application for membership.

There are similar statements in more elaborate forms from the Office of Legal Affairs itself, and from others in the UN Secretariat. It also happened when Taiwan tried to submit instruments of accession to major UN human rights treaties, most notably the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

Fast forward a couple of years to 2010. There's a second OLA memorandum. ... It, too, quotes [Resolution] 2758, and then says that the resolution “regulates the status of Chinese Taipei/Taiwan in the United Nations,” and that “since the adoption of the resolution and in accordance with the decision which it contains, the United Nations have considered ‘Taiwan’ for all purposes to be an integral part of the People's Republic of China, without any separate status.”

But like the prior memorandum, this one does less than seems to meet the eye as a matter of international law. Ban himself had said that longstanding UN policy, before and since, has been that if members want to propose membership for Taiwan, they can try and get it on the agenda. It won't work, but they can try it, and they can submit documents, calling it whatever they want to call it. And the OLA memorandum here again actually governed a very narrow issue, despite the big top line rhetoric. The question was, basically, if you have an ROC passport, is that good enough to get you through the door of a meeting of the plenary body for the CEDAW Convention? Practice has been inconsistent. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. ...

What you see is China relying on 2758 as having implications beyond the UN. Taiwan lost its observer status at the Central American Parliament [in 2023], and the basis for that was 2758. One prominent PRC international legal scholar has actually written an article that has made the argument that this is, or almost is, now a principle of customary international law.

Just to wrap up, the last point here clarifies how big the stakes are.... If you accept the PRC narrative that the one China principle is international law and therefore Taiwan is a part of China, you essentially accept that any change in Taiwan’s status would be secession. Then you've got permission for China to use force, if need be, to deal with secession by Taiwan. States have lots of latitude to put down rebellions to end civil wars.

If you accept the PRC narrative that the one China principle is international law and therefore Taiwan is a part of China ... then you've got permission for China to use force, if need be, to deal with secession by Taiwan.

Other states intervening would be either an impermissible intervention in another state’s civil dispute, or would be the use of force against the territorial integrity and sovereign autonomy of a China that includes Taiwan, in violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter as well as customary international law. So, too, it would arguably be a violation of Article 2(7) of the UN Charter, which prohibits outside interference in the domestic affairs of other states. You see this argument pretty clearly in the White Paper of 2022. The White Paper invokes “important principles of respecting State sovereignty and territorial integrity, as enshrined in the Charter of the UN and modern international law and international relations. It goes without saying that the Chinese government is entitled to take all measures necessary to settle the Taiwan question free of external interference.”

On the other hand, if you reject those PRC readings, and if you leave open the door to a claim that Taiwan is a state or a quasi-state, or at least has robust international legal personality, then coercive measures by the PRC become problematic. They are potentially uses of force in violation of 2(4) and 2(7). And Taiwan would have the right if it is a state, or something close to it, to pursue collective self-defense, a right recognized in Article 51 of the UN Charter and customary international law.

I'll close by saying that accepting the PRC narrative doesn't mean international law wouldn't matter. There are still human rights constraints for how you act in your sovereign territory. There are international humanitarian law constraints that would apply if forcible methods were used, and internal conflicts that threaten the international peace are cognizable by the Security Council – that is, are considered matters of international legal concern. But don't hold your breath on the Security Council acting in a Taiwan contingency, given that China has veto power.

***

Wilhelm: You said that Resolution 2758 was not a vote about statehood. Could you explain further what the vote was about? Was it about membership in the club of states?

deLisle: There are several layers to why 2758 as a matter of international law falls short of China's claim that it establishes the one China principle. One is text. There's nothing in the text of 2758 that addresses Taiwan or sovereignty and it doesn't address the territorial issues. The evidence, including statements from [then-Chinese Premier] Zhou Enlai and from most assessments at the time, is that this was not a question of membership in the UN. China was a member [of the UN], and the question was who got to sit in the Chinese seat. There was a pretty good argument that if anybody was going to sit in the Chinese seat, it should be Beijing and not Taipei, for obvious reasons of who was controlling China.

China was a member [of the UN], and the question was who got to sit in the Chinese seat.

Most states [voting on the resolution] weren't terribly clear about what they thought they were doing. It's just not that transparent, although there are 30-plus members of what was then a smaller UN that do seem to have said, in some cases clearly said, that they saw this as essentially a credentials question.

So there are layers here. Are you a member of the UN? That's a question at a fundamental level that wasn't addressed here, that the UN General Assembly can address only in conjunction with the Security Council. They decide membership of states; it has to go through both, and this was not that. So we're not talking about states. We're talking at most about governments. And there's a pretty darn good argument that the PRC, not the ROC, is the government of China. And indeed, in 1971, both the ROC and the PRC claim to be the government of China.

And then one level down from that is credentials and representation. That one follows fairly automatically, in the sense that if you've decided that one government rather than another is the holder of the state of China's seat, then, of course, its representatives get in.

You asked: what does the UN think about Taiwan? My view is, they haven't taken that much of a position. They've had these top line statements, which are really weird rhetoric, but if you look at what the authoritative statements and the powers of the UN can be, then the answer is not much. Again, the UN General Assembly does not have the authority to decide questions of statehood. That's fairly undisputed. That would be a question of UN membership. ... It is generally accepted that you have to be a state to be a member of the UN. That is decided by the General Assembly, and the Security Council. I believe it gets on the agenda through proposals to General Assembly and has to be cleared by Security Council, and then it goes back to the General Assembly for a vote.

Wilhelm: That was not the process that was done here [when voting on Resolution 2758].

deLisle: No, it was never invoked. There was really no membership question, because at that point everybody was accepting that there was a state of China that was a member, and the only question was who got to represent it. ... At that point, there was no territorial sovereignty dispute. The claim was China included Taiwan, and the question was who was going to be the government.

Over time, of course, this evolves. You see Taiwanese leaders going … farther down the path of saying the “ROC or Taiwan,” or “the ROC (Taiwan),” or “the ROC on Taiwan,” or “the state that is Taiwan, but now known as the ROC,” or “some people call us the ROC, some people call us Taiwan,” etc. There is this sort of notion that that moves farther and farther towards saying that there is a separate state or state-like entity that is Taiwan.

I mentioned the four criteria for statehood. The Montevideo Convention is the source of this, but it's now customary international law. There are four principles of statehood, and the [unspoken] fifth one is that you have to declare clearly that you are a state. The four principles are: a defined territory, a defined population, a government, (which is understood to mean not answering to a superior government and providing governance at home). Taiwan ticks all those boxes well. The fourth one is the capacity to engage in relations with other states. Taiwan does well on informal [relations] and does badly on formal. And then the fifth one is, you declare it.

To the extent that's taken as being a July 4th moment – [President] Chen Shui-bian stands up and says, “台湾共和国现在成立了” (“The Republic of Taiwan has now been established!”) – you can't do that, because bombs would start flying. So what happened is, the attempt [by Taiwan] is to sneak past it and say, that happened somewhere. We're not quite sure where, we’re not quite sure when, and we're not going to say it. But the current reality is this. So that's all the statehood stuff.

But I want to get back to being fair to the PRC argument here, which is: it's not leaning solely on 2758. ... The argument really is that it’s part of this kind of universal consensus-like thing that has emerged that takes away statehood. One piece of that is another PRC argument that says the 180-some states that maintain diplomatic relations with the PRC and not with the ROC have done so on the basis of the one China principle. That is an exaggerated statement. There are states that state the one China principle, and there are states that take positions that are fully in line with China's version of one China principle.

Wilhelm: The Economist had a recent article quoting from a Lowry Institute report, which says 119 states now back China's claims to sovereignty over Taiwan. The new development is that 70 states back the PRC's language about it being justified to use all efforts to reunify the country. They reported that in the past 18 months, the number has soared. Last September at the African summit in Beijing, 53 African states joined in a statement that said that not only did they recognize that the PRC has sovereignty over Taiwan, but they support the PRC taking all efforts, obviously including the implicit use of force or use of whatever measures [to reunify the country].

deLisle: Yeah, there's a lot of nose counting. ... The more you get other states saying that they accept China's one China principle or something close to it, and accept the notion that “all measures” are okay, which implicitly includes use of force, then that's implicitly accepting the idea that it would be a question of secession were Taiwan to go independent.

The old view was: you weren't a state unless other states recognized you as being a state. If that were still the rule, Taiwan would be in deep trouble.

This gets us back to some really old international law nerd stuff, which is the constitutive versus declaratory theories of recognition. The old view was: you weren't a state unless other states recognized you as being a state. If that were still the rule, Taiwan would be in deep trouble, as nobody recognizes it as a state in any formal or full way. But that's largely been abandoned in favor of the declaratory theory, which says if you tick those four or maybe five boxes of the Montevideo (now customary) criteria, then it doesn't matter whether anybody recognizes you or not. Now, of course, that distinction is a little precious, because if you really are a pariah, then it is very hard to engage in functional international relations. So at some level, the kinds of things that lead to lack of recognition as a state can undermine the ability to engage in international relations – the fourth criterion.

Wilhelm: What is the force of having an international consensus? The PRC would like to see this as a kind of an international referendum and then argue that this not only bolsters the PRC’s position and weakens Taiwan’s for practical purposes, but that it also changes international law. This is something you address in your [German Marshall Fund] paper. Can you say more about it?

deLisle: Here I want to do a little bit of separation. What I've been trying to talk about is how to understand where the UN is on this. Then there's a further question about in what ways the UN position matters. I don't think there is any plausible international legal argument that a referendum will do it – that is, if you got all the states to raise their hands, stating what they thought the status of Taiwan is. If you still adhere to the declaratory rather than the constitutive theory of recognition, then that's a nice expression of opinion, but it doesn't settle the matter. And if you put it to a UN General Assembly vote, that's even one step removed, because states have not ceded their individual authority to make that decision to any collective UN vote.

That said, the game is to push this farther and farther down the path, so that at a minimum, Taiwan's ability to say it satisfies the fourth criteria of statehood starts to fall apart. There are real political consequences in that. In a crisis where the use of force looks possible ... the ability to get other states to rally [in support of Taiwan] is greater if you can say this is not supporting secession of Taiwan from China. Rather, it is trying to keep the international peace and status quo, or to prevent China from using force against something that may have at least enough of the attributes of statehood that we worry about this being an impermissible international use of force.

States have not ceded their individual authority to make that decision to any collective UN vote.

The stronger argument from China is that indirect one. The stuff accumulates, and it starts to matter. The more it becomes like a vote, I think the weaker the argument [to support Taiwan] is.

Wilhelm: And it becomes customary international law?

deLisle: I have not seen an official [Chinese] statement that explicitly says that it is a principle of customary international law that Taiwan is part of China. There's one prominent, fairly orthodox [Chinese] scholar who's made that claim in print, although even he fudges between saying it is a principle, and saying it is headed toward being a principle.

To be a principle of customary international law, you have to have at least a couple of things. One is that it has to be generally accepted in the community of states, which requires numerosity and diversity. Many states in the West or the global North are agnostic about Taiwan status, including the official US position, so they wouldn't accept it as necessarily part of China. The other [requirement] is, it has to be accepted as binding as a matter of law, opinio juris, rather than simply a convenient policy position. And there's at least an argument that to be a rule of customary international law, you have to have some degree of generality. Rules of customary international law are the principles for determining whether something is a state or not. It’s not application to particular cases. And the better Chinese arguments take that form. They say Taiwan just doesn't tick these boxes. No one accepts it as a state. And they've got a pretty good argument on that. Whether everyone accepts it as being part of China is a rather different question.

Wilhelm: Is there a process for the UN Secretariat to take a position on statehood or on jurisdictional matters generally, such as borders?

A: The simple answer is no. The complicated answer is messier. So what you see going back to the earliest days of the United Nations, and stated repeatedly since then and from the Secretary General's office, drawing on Office of Legal Affairs opinions, is that the question of recognizing states ... is a prerogative of member states, that member states have not ceded to the United Nations. As far as I know, the General Assembly has never really purported to determine issues of sovereignty over disputed territory.

When the Security Council is deadlocked, you've seen some of these sovereignty and territorial disputes sometimes get on the General Assembly agenda, but it's more like Russia's assault on Ukraine. If you frame that as the attack of one state against another, you're implicitly rejecting Putin's position. But that's not really the same thing as purporting to determine Ukraine’s status.

What happens is the Secretariat does issue these documents. The two formal OLA memos are the most prominent ones addressing Taiwan. But there's a whole bunch of other stuff. There's lots of correspondence on the Taiwan issue between the secretary general, speaking for himself, or kicking the problem down to the Office of Legal Affairs, to communicate with those who are on either side of this issue, either China or Taiwan's diplomatic allies. And in there there is a lot of rhetoric that says: the UN has considered Taiwan, for all intents and purposes, to be an integral part of China since [Resolution] 2758, or that the UN considers Taiwan to be “Taiwan, province of China.” But I think that stuff is ultimately dictum.

What these things actually decide are questions about whether documents can be accepted, whether passports can be used, whether Taiwan can get access to these things. So they are technically intra-UN [decisions]. Is that a judgment on facts about the broader world, or is it a statement about the rules within the UN system? The rhetoric is really, really bad for Taiwan and really, really good for China. But there's at least an argument that [the rhetoric] doesn't do any of that, and that even if it wanted to do some of that, it either hasn't done that textually, and could not do that constitutionally.

Audience question: The UN Charter calls for self-determination of peoples, especially in the post-colonial context. Taiwan was ruled by Japan from the Sino-Japanese War until 1945. The people of Taiwan were never consulted after 1945 as to who they wanted to be ruled by. We had Chiang Kai-shek more or less invading the island with his fleeing forces. So why doesn't the concept of self-determination of peoples apply here?

deLisle: What is legally defensible, morally compelling, and politically feasible turns in part on which of two fundamentally opposed premises about the current state of affairs you accept. If you accept China's narrative, then the argument is that Taiwan is part of China, Taiwanese are Chinese, just like Henanese are Chinese. There's no separate people to self-determine. Also, this is not a post-colonial context, because ... the PRC position is that Taiwan never left Chinese sovereignty because the Sino-Japanese war treaty was an unequal treaty, void ab initio. It never worked because it was coerced.

There are also backup arguments. It was essentially a land for peace deal. In 1937, when Japan invaded China, it violated the peace terms, and therefore Taiwan reverted. If that doesn't do it, then, when Japanese forces surrendered to the ROC forces in 1945, Taiwan then returned to China, where the ROC purported to be the government of all of China. Then when the revolution happened, the PRC succeeded to all the rights of the ROC.

So this is the argument. And if you buy all of that, then what Taiwan would be doing, and what Taiwan functionally has done but China says it hasn't legally done, is secede. The [PRC] Anti-Secession Law says that Taiwan has not seceded, but if they ever try, there will be hell to pay.

The [PRC] Anti-Secession Law says that Taiwan has not seceded, but if they ever try, there will be hell to pay.

On the other hand, if you accept the view that Taiwan’s status is that of a full-fledged state, which you increasingly see Taiwanese leaders going up to, or if you say that Taiwan entered an unsettled zone once the Japanese gave it up in in 1945, and the status has never been resolved [the US position] ... then it is true that [in cases of] decolonization, especially so-called “blue-water decolonization,” referring to African and Asian colonies of European metropolitan states, there the norm is self-determination, which means you get your own state. Contiguous land area is a little less clear: Quebec, for instance, or Tibet and Xinjiang. If you're a distinct people, you don't necessarily get your own state; you get some kind of accommodation in a larger state. That's pretty well accepted.

You've got the prior question of whether Taiwanese are a separate people. You see all these opinion polls from National Chengchi University and others. Clearly the view is that most Taiwanese consider themselves to be either exclusively Taiwanese, or at most Taiwanese and Chinese. The number considering themselves Chinese is now vanishingly small.

The other wrinkle in this is that one of the preferred, but not required, forms of dealing with questions of self-determination is a referendum among the people. Taiwan has a referendum law. Taiwanese leaders have been wise enough to know that conducting a referendum would be a terrible idea because it probably would not hit the high threshold for referenda to be binding in Taiwan, partly because Taiwanese voters would recognize the consequences of voting for that kind of status. If somehow it did pass, or even if it got a significant share of votes, or, worse yet, it got 50 percent plus, but not enough to count as legally binding in Taiwan, that would be a problem.

Wilhelm: In 1971 at the UN, there were a lot of versions of resolutions on the table. At least one of the alternative versions that was not voted on suggested that the resolution should recognize the right of the people of Taiwan to self -determination.

deLisle: And it also was proposed to have dual representation.

Wilhelm: Maybe you can talk a little bit about dual representation. That is the way the UN had a seat for East Germany and a seat for West Germany, and still has a seat for North Korea and a seat for South Korea.

deLisle: In the German case, we got mutual acceptance [by East and West Germany] as “at least for now states,” with the ultimate goal of unification. Korea is a little more complicated, but they accepted each other, at least as co-members of the UN. These [arrangements] were framed as temporarily divided states.

Over the years, Taiwanese leaders and politicians and legal thinkers who want to push for more secure, robust status for Taiwan have tried every analogy in the book. All of them wind up with blowback in one form or another. [As president,] Chen Shui-bian floated both the Korea and Germany parallels, saying, there's nothing about being two states now that precludes ultimate unification. So don't worry, China; we're not saying we're gone forever, but for now we're separate.

Another [analogy] was the European Union, in which significant amounts of sovereignty are given to a larger entity. Then there is “one country, two systems,” the PRC [formula] that puts sovereignty in the foreground and promises essentially delegated autonomy. “We both belong to one Chinese nation” was another formulation. “Nation”, not “state.”

[Then-Taiwan President] Lee Teng-hui said back in 1999 that cross-strait relations are state-to-state special relations. And he also said other international law gobbledygook. The famous July 1, 1999, statement from Lee Teng-hui said that the Republic of China has been an independent sovereign state since the Xinhai Geming [the 1911 Revolution], since the initial movement founding of the ROC, and there is no need to declare independence again. Well, that's gobbledygook because the state of China predated the ROC. It was a change in government, not a change in states.

And then you get the occasional argument that says: hey, it's the mainland that seceded from the ROC, and the ROC goes on. That creates all sorts of problems, because when large states break up, as we saw with the Soviet Union, the predominant state is the continuing state, and the other ones are new states.

Every analogy you push on falls apart in terms of describing the existing thing. And if you're trying to find an accommodation, the problem is, no matter what label you stick on it, it's unstable. If you look at all the arrangements for halfway-house sovereignty that international law has ever been able to come up with, they are functionally unstable.

If you look at all the arrangements for halfway-house sovereignty that international law has ever been able to come up with, they are functionally unstable.

Wilhelm: What do the UN statements and memos from the OLA mean for Taiwan’s participation in international organizations?

deLisle: Post-UN Resolution 2758, there has been some flexibility in how the UN and its affiliated special agencies have dealt with Taiwan. There's nothing in 2758 that seems to have dictated any particular position. What exactly it means has been subject to influence from Beijing, Washington, and Taiwan's diplomatic partners, and indirectly from Taiwan. As you know, during the [Taiwan President] Ma Ying-jeou years, Taiwan was allowed to attend the World Health Assembly. It could join the plenary annual sessions on an ad hoc invitation basis.

Wilhelm: Could it vote?

deLisle: No, observer status. And the US and others have supported observer status in various international organizations. And on the narrow issue of whether an ROC passport can you get into a UN meeting, sometimes yes, sometimes no. If one of your diplomatic partners wants to submit a document [to the UN] that refers to something other than “Taiwan, China,” those documents usually get in; sometimes they don't.

I think it is fair to say that in the practice of the UN bureaucracy, the drift has been toward something closer to those top-line rhetoric statements which are fairly in line with China's position of the one China principle. There are a number of reasons for that. There are a lot of PRC nationals in various positions in the UN, and the PRC and its leadership pushes the secretary general pretty hard on this. Also, if you talk to people down in the trenches in the UN, who are not legal officers, what they know is: the UN [Resolution] 2758 settled that Taiwan is part of China. That's their mindset. So the gravitational pull within the UN system is for a very limited role for Taiwan. ...

Basically, state member-only organizations, which includes the UN and its affiliated agencies, are off the table for membership. The question is: can you get some [lesser] degree of representation. The US doesn't even support membership for Taiwan in state-only membership organizations, but does support meaningful participation. The TAIPEI Act [Taiwan Allies International Protection and Enhancement Initiative Act of 2019] puts this into legislation, but it's pretty long-standing policy.

Taiwan does seek and sometimes get access pretty much every place else. It's in the World Trade Organization ... the Asian Development Bank, APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation). Many of Taiwan’s successes are in organizations where the PRC was not already a member. It’s much harder where an organization already includes the PRC, and the PRC essentially blocks Taiwan's access. ...

For those organizations that it is not able to join or even engage significantly with, it engages in “as if” participation. Taiwan can't accede to the major UN human rights covenants, but it does performative parallels to the universal periodic reviews. It makes very clear that it will adhere to the international law of the sea, the UNCLOS convention, even though it's not allowed to join it.

Wilhelm: What is your understanding of what people in Taiwan would like from the UN?

deLisle: I don't think there's a uniform view in Taiwan. Views in Taiwan are based in part on assessments of what happens if we do that. A reliable opinion poll in Taiwan would yield the following two results to two questions. If China didn't care, should Taiwan be independent? You’d get pretty good support for that. Given that this is probably a cause for war and existential threat, should Taiwan declare independence? You get equally overwhelming majoriy going the other way. SoI really think you're almost asking more about people's assessments of consequences rather than ideal preferences.

* * *

Jacques deLisle is the Stephen A. Cozen Professor of Law, professor of political science, and director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Jacques deLisle, “What Does the United Nations Say About Taiwan?” USALI Talking Points, June 27, 2025, https://usali.org/publications/talking-points-what-does-the-united-nations-say-about-taiwan.

The views expressed are those of the speaker, and do not represent those of USALI or NYU.

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