Taiwan says China trying to create legal basis for attack with UN resolution interpretation

By Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo

TAIPEI/BEIJING (Reuters) -Taiwan's government on Wednesday said China was trying to create the legal basis for a future attack with its "misleading" interpretation of a key U.N. resolution, in an escalating dispute over who has the right to claim sovereignty over the island.

China says that 1971's U.N. resolution 2758, which led to Taiwan's expulsion from the body and Beijing assuming a seat at the U.N., gives international legal backing to its claims over the island, and reiterated that point in a long foreign ministry statement late on Tuesday.

Taiwan, formally called the Republic of China and whose government fled to the island in 1949 after losing a civil war with Mao Zedong's communists, says that is nonsense given the resolution made no mention of Taiwan and that in any case the People's Republic of China has never ruled the island.

TAIWAN SAYS CHINA MISLEADING INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

Taiwan's foreign ministry said in a statement that China was "deliberately misleading" the international community with its characterisation of the resolution.

"This aims to create a legal basis for altering the status quo across the Taiwan Strait and for future military assault against Taiwan," it said.

"Only Taiwan's democratically elected government can represent the 23 million people of Taiwan within the United Nations system and multilateral international mechanisms," the ministry added.

China's foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. China has never renounced the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control, and regularly sends its military into the waters and skies around the island.

China says Taiwan is merely one of its provinces.

Its foreign ministry's statement on Tuesday, full of Cold War-era language about the "reactionary" Republic of China government and its late leader Chiang Kai-shek's "clique", said the People's Republic was the rightful inheritor to governing all of China, including Taiwan, following the 1949 revolution.

"Any attempt to challenge resolution 2758 constitutes not only a challenge to China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, but also a challenge to the authority of the U.N.," it said.

China has been incensed by remarks from the United States and some of its allies about the resolution.

The U.S. State Department, in comments provided to Reuters about the latest Chinese statement on the subject, said the "intentional mischaracterisation and misuse of resolution 2758" was part of China's broader "coercive attempts to isolate Taiwan from the international community resolution".

The resolution puts no limits on any country's sovereign choice to engage substantively with Taiwan, the State Department added. 

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by David Brunnstrom in Washington, editing by Ed Osmond)