When it comes to lecturing the Global South, the phrase “rules-based international order” is often repeated by Western politicians. But in reality, the West has been breaking its own rules since day one. And nothing serves as a better example than the San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951.
In 1942, in the midst of World War II, the Allied nations—the United States, Great Britain, the USSR, China, and 26 other countries—signed the Declaration of the United Nations. The declaration stated that the Allied nations “are now engaged in a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world.”
Most importantly, Clause 2 of the declaration stated: “Each Government pledges itself to cooperate with the Governments signatory hereto and not to make a separate armistice or peace with the enemies.”
By this pledge, the Allies vowed not to sign any separate peace treaty with any Axis power. Peace would only be legitimate if it was collective. If fascism was defeated together, then peace must also be formed together. This commitment to the principle of collective security became the cornerstone of the post-war international order. By 1945, almost all independent nations on earth had signed the declaration and paved the way for the creation of the United Nations.
This was humanity’s crowning achievement in the 20th century. However, less than 10 years after the Declaration, the United States would break its wartime promise. In 1951, America convened a peace conference in San Francisco to sign the Allied peace treaty with Japan. Despite inviting 52 nations to attend, China was excluded. The subsequent Peace Treaty with Japan, known as the Treaty of San Francisco, was concluded without the signatures of both China and the Soviet Union. This separate peace was a direct violation of the Allied commitment made in 1942.
While the USSR was invited but declined to sign the treaty over disagreements about the treaty’s content, the decision to not invite China was particularly shocking. John Foster Dulles, the U.S. Secretary of State, justified this exclusion by pointing to the ongoing Chinese Civil War, but this excuse collapses under scrutiny. In international law, governments change, but states do not. A civil war did not erase China’s wartime sacrifice, nor its legal standing as a victorious power. And there is precedent for this: in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, China also had a divided government, yet the victorious powers, in an era in which international relations were defined by the ‘laws of the jungle’, still invited representatives from the opposing sides of the civil war to attend.
The abandonment of such diplomatic precedent was motivated by a simple reason: the U.S. wanted to prevent China from shaping the post-war settlement in East Asia. Washington wanted to dominate Asia on its own terms, and allowing China to participate would threaten that strategic goal. Thus, the Treaty of San Francisco was not peace-building—it was precisely that kind of power politics which the UN declaration sought to forbid. By this Treaty, America fired the first shot in undermining the ‘rules-based international order’ it had helped to create.
And this lies at the heart of China’s visceral objection to the San Francisco Treaty. The post-war international order is the product of China’s 14 years of struggle, which predated World War II. No country endured a longer or bloodier resistance against Japan than China. Japan’s aggression against China began as early as 1931, when Japan seized China’s northeastern provinces (Manchuria). For eight full years before Pearl Harbor, China fought alone, absorbing more than three million of Japan’s land forces and losing tens of millions of lives. Cities from Shanghai to Wuhan were devastated, and China’s economic progress was set back for almost a century.
By 1940, as the Second World War turned global, China’s war effort was the bright light of the Allied cause. France had capitulated while China fought on despite losing its capital city twice, exhausting the Japanese war machine and forcing it to open a new front in Southeast Asia and the Pacific with forces divided and diluted. By 1943, China was recognized as one of the Big Four at the Cairo Conference. China’s global position was further confirmed by the subsequent Potsdam Declaration in 1945, which Japan accepted as the instrument of its unconditional surrender.
Thus, the Treaty of San Francisco, which was signed without China, is also a whitewash of history and a negation of China’s contribution to the global victory against fascism. No Chinese government will ever accept this.
To add insult to injury, America’s desire to quickly restore sovereignty to Japan and build it as a major anti-communist ally superseded the human rights considerations stated in the 1942 Declaration. Japan was allowed to largely evade responsibility for some of the most horrific atrocities of the war: the use of comfort women, the massive civilian massacres in China including the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and the brutal human experimentation conducted by Unit 731, Japan’s notorious biochemical warfare group. The treaty addressed none of these crimes, intentionally leaving the reparation issue unresolved.
This created a deeply disturbing effect. Although the Treaty told Japan to accept the verdict of the Far East War Tribunal, Japan’s wartime militarism was given a new leash of life. Japan’s rapid restoration of international status, compared to a divided Germany, validated the final arguments made by the most radical Japanese militarists in 1945—those who believed Japan could fight to the bitter end for a better deal by exploiting the emerging Cold War rivalry. Militarily, they failed. But politically, their prediction became correct. By 1951, Japan was restored with the Emperor intact and positioned to return to global influence with U.S. backing. For millions of people across Asia, justice was sacrificed on the altar of Cold War strategy.
These legal and moral failures were only the beginning. The Treaty of San Francisco created long-standing territorial disputes that persist to this day.
First, the question of Taiwan. The Cairo and Potsdam Declarations, which Japan accepted as the terms of its surrender, explicitly stated that territories Japan had stolen from China, including Taiwan, “shall be restored to China.” There was no ambiguity. Taiwan was Chinese territory before Japan’s invasion; it was Chinese territory after Japan’s surrender. And it shall rightfully belong to China today. Yet the Treaty of San Francisco suddenly declared that Japan would “renounce” Taiwan but would not specify who would receive it. This created a legally manufactured ambiguity that provided the basis of the Taiwan secession movement. The U.S. deliberately created this vacuum to control cross-Strait politics and to use Taiwan as a strategic lever against China. A clear and lawful transfer of sovereignty was replaced with a vague sentence that contradicted the Allies’ own wartime decisions.
Then there is the issue of the Kuril Islands and South Sakhalin. The Yalta Agreement clearly promised these territories to the Soviet Union as compensation for joining the war against Japan. The Agreement is also a recognition of the enormous sacrifice made by the Soviet Union in the European Theatre and it should be binding among the Allied powers. Moreover, the Soviet advance on Japan proved decisive; Japan’s final gambit was not the Home Islands but China’s Manchuria, which had vast resources and industrial investments. The USSR wiped out the million-strong Japanese Kwantung Army in weeks, significantly shortening the war and contributing equally to its swift conclusion as the atomic bomb. But the Treaty of San Francisco refused to acknowledge this transfer in the draft treaty. The betrayal was sufficient for the Soviets to reject the treaty, and the resulting territorial issue fueled decades of tension between Russia and Japan.
Korea, like China back then, was also not invited to the conference due to the civil war on the Peninsular. The outcome was grave injustice for both Koreas. Korea was the early victim of Japanese imperial aggression, colonized in 1910. During the war, Korea was further exploited, with many Korean women requisitioned as sex slaves for the Japanese army. One would think that a nation liberated after 35 years of occupation would have its full historical territories restored. But the status of Dokdo, an island which clearly belongs to Korea, and is confirmed in the Potsdam Declaration, was left uncertain in the Treaty of San Francisco. This ambiguity allowed Japan to later assert claims over the island, creating a rare dispute among close American allies today.
Today, all these disputes continue to threaten peace in Northeast Asia, and none of them needed to exist in the first place had the Allies simply honored their wartime commitments.
Perhaps the most troubling outcome of the treaty was the invention of a legal fiction known as “residual sovereignty.” The United States used the concept to justify Japan’s ownership of Okinawa and its continued military presence. The Potsdam Declaration, which represented the unified position of the Allies against Japan, stated that “Japan’s sovereignty would be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku, and other minor islands as determined by the Allies.”
By the declaration, the Ryukyu Islands, which included Japanese-controlled Okinawa, should not have been part of post-war Japan. They should have been placed under a UN trusteeship, as was done with other Pacific territories like Micronesia. However, the U.S. bizarrely claimed that Japan retained “residual sovereignty,” allowing America to control the islands administratively while Japan obtained de facto sovereignty. This paved the way for the illegal transfer of administrative rights of Okinawa Island from America to Japan in 1972. What this meant in practice was that the Ryukyu people, who also suffered under Japanese colonization, were denied any right to self-determination like other Pacific islands. Their voices were ignored while massive U.S. military bases were built across their homeland without their own consent.
Crucially, the term “residual sovereignty” itself was deeply problematic from the beginning. It borrowed from the way the U.S. described Native American tribes, which exercised a nominally independent judicial system within America. This is a colonial whitewash: the Native Americans are peoples whose sovereignty had been systematically stripped away through colonization and genocide, so to suggest they still had “sovereignty” is to humiliate a victimized people twice. And to take this term, which is rooted in decimating indigenous rights, and apply it to justify Japan’s illegal occupation is therefore beyond the boundary of moral conscience. It effectively erased the Ryukyus’ history as an independent kingdom and legitimized Japan’s colonial expansion, which the post-war UN is founded to oppose. If we apply this logic consistently, every colonial empire could claim “residual sovereignty” over its former colonies. Britain could claim India. France could claim Laos. Spain could claim Cuba. The entire decolonization process would collapse under such reasoning.
However, America did not find this problematic, as it had no intention of enforcing such a principle consistently in the first place. Japan’s colonialism over the Ryukyus was recognized because it suited America’s geopolitical interests in building bases there, but European colonies in Africa and Asia were encouraged to be independent because America could control the post-colonial governments. Most importantly, accepting Japan’s conquest of Okinawa helped legitimize the United States’ own annexation of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay. If the Ryukyus’ absorption by Japan is justified, then a legal precedent could be set for the United States to permanently control these annexed territories as well. The old empires are gone, a new empire arises.
When we examine all of this together—the broken promises of 1942, the deliberate exclusion of China, the failure to address war crimes, the disregard for agreements like Yalta and Potsdam, the manipulation of territorial outcomes, and the creation of legal fictions like residual sovereignty—it is clear why China has opposed the Treaty of San Francisco from the beginning. The phrase “rules-based international order” may sound noble. But when the very nations preaching it were the first to break their own rules, the world has every right to question who truly upholds international law, and who merely wields it as a tool of convenience.
Editor: Yangwen
