Taiwan's outgoing national archives chief says decades of democratic reform — not the 1943 Cairo Declaration — are what make the government in Taipei legitimate, a framing that cuts against Beijing's historical claim to the island.

• Academia Historica director Chen Yi-shen says the Republic of China government would have been seen as an illegal outside regime had it kept ruling Taiwan by force without elections.
• Martial law ending in 1987 and the full reelection of parliament in the early 1990s gave the government its legitimacy, he says.
• He calls the Cairo Declaration "a comma, not a period" — Japan surrendered in Taipei to the whole Allied camp, with Chinese, American, British and Soviet flags on display, not to China alone.
• Britain refused to recognize Taipei's move to change Taiwanese people's nationality, and the later San Francisco peace treaty never handed sovereignty over Taiwan to China.
• The point lands in MacArthur's 1950 line: give the power to define Taiwan's future back to the Taiwanese people.

Outlook: Expect the "undetermined status" argument to stay central to Taiwan's pushback as Beijing leans harder on the Cairo Declaration to justify its claim.