Taiwan’s Foreign Relations

Abstract

When Chiang Kai-shek sat down with a reluctant Winston Churchill and a supportive Franklin Roosevelt at Cairo in 1943, his government seemed to have achieved the peaks of international status. Chiang was only excluded from the summits of the Great Powers, with Stalin also in attendance, because it was not until the dying days of the Second World War that the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. In June 1945, the Republic of China became one of the founder members of the United Nations. As the government recognised as legitimate ruler of the world’s most populous nation, it was only natural that the ROC should be given a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, along with the US, the Soviet Union, Britain and France. The ROC thus had a veto power over many of the most important decisions of this new world body for which such hopes were held.