Japan and the United Nations

This Chinese poster featuring the United Nations headquarters building alongside the UN flag, with Japanese and Chinese text proclaiming "Japan and the United Nations," documents the complex Cold War politics surrounding China's representation in the international body. The 1965 Manila USIA poster showed flags of UN member nations at a time when the question of which Chinese government—the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China (Taiwan)—deserved UN representation became increasingly contentious. On October 25, 1971, the UN General Assembly voted 76-35 with 17 abstentions to recognize PRC representatives as the only legitimate representatives of China, expelling Taiwan's delegation and fundamentally reshaping Cold War geopolitics.

The poster's emphasis on Japan's UN membership, secured in 1956 after lengthy negotiations about Japan's World War II role, reflects the reconfiguration of Asian power dynamics during the Cold War. For twenty-two years following the PRC's 1949 establishment, the United States successfully blocked communist China's UN admission while supporting Taiwan's claim to represent all of China—a legal fiction that became increasingly untenable as the PRC consolidated control over the mainland and expanded diplomatic recognition. The poster captures a transitional moment when Asian nations navigated between Cold War allegiances and emerging regional identities, with the UN serving as arena for legitimacy contests between rival governments. China's eventual admission represented a major diplomatic victory for Beijing and defeat for Washington's containment strategy, acknowledging political reality that the world's most populous nation could no longer be excluded from international institutions regardless of ideological objections to its communist government.