Abstract
The Republic of China (ROC), also nowadays known as Taiwan, has dealt with refugees and asylum seekers since its establishment in 1911. It received around 60,000 White Russian refugees after the 1917 Russian Revolution and around 20,000 Jewish refugees during the Second World War. After it retreated from mainland China to the islands of Taiwan in 1949, the ROC has from time to time provided asylum to “defectors” from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and also accepted around 10,000 Indochinese refugees for resettlement between 1975 and 1990. More recently, more than 1,000 Hong Kong activists have sought refuge in the ROC since 2019,4 and several Ukrainians protested outside the Russian representative office in Taipei in 2022, calling on the ROC to enact a refugee law and assist Ukrainian asylum seekers. The ROC has also received small numbers of refugees and asylum seekers from other countries such as The Gambia, Colombia, and Uganda.
The ROC is a somewhat peculiar case of a non-signatory to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol (together and individually the Refugee Convention). Following the adoption of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly Resolution 2758 on October 25, 1971, the ROC lost its seat at the UN to the PRC and has not been recognized as a sovereign state by the UN. As a result, it has been generally excluded from the UN treaty system and could not become a signatory to the Refugee Convention even if it wanted to. Notably, the ROC is one of the few non-signatories that participated in the drafting process of the 1951 Convention.