Saturday, June 28, 2008

1953: Renmin Ribao says Senkakus part of Japan

A kind friend forwarded me some images from the past: Chinese newspapers from 1953. I have assembled them into the image above.... Yesterday I blogged on John Tkacik's piece in the Taipei Times that included a tidbit on China's pre-1969 attitude toward the Diaoyutai Islands. Tkacik wrote:

A People’s Daily commentary of June 1953, which called on the people of Okinawa to resist the US imperialists occupying their homelands, enumerated the “Jiange” (Senkaku) islands as part of the Ryukyu chain, clear evidence that the Beijing government considered the islands part of Japan even in the heat of the Korean War.

The 1953 news article from the Renmin Ribao that used the Chinese version of the Japanese name for the islands, and included them in Ryukyus, is imaged above. The article is entitled something like: Intelligencer: the Ryukyun People's Struggle Against US Occupation. The first sentence in Chinese says...琉球群島....我國台灣東北和日本九週洲島西南之間的海面上, 包括尖閣諸島, 先諸島 . . ."The Ryukyus are located in the ocean northwest of China's Taiwan and southwest of Japan's [九週洲島] islands, and include the Senkakus, the.... The original is dated Jan Nov 1953, not June as in the Tkacik piece (an apparent typo). The article is not pictured in the inset; that merely gives the date.

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