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Takaichi Calls for UN Charter's 'Enemy State Clauses' to Be Scrapped; China Warns of Challenge to Postwar Order
Reporter 欧亚时报编辑部
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, in her first address to the UN General Assembly since taking office, told the 81st session's general debate in New York on September 22 (local time) that the "enemy state clauses" in the UN Charter targeting Japan and other countries should be deleted as soon as possible. She also called for reforming the UN Security Council by expanding both permanent and non-permanent seats. China's Foreign Ministry and several scholars quickly pushed back, arguing that Japan's push to scrap the clauses, combined with its ongoing military buildup, challenges the post-World War II international order and could threaten regional stability. Takaichi took office on October 21 last year as Japan's first female prime minister and its 104th, and is known as a hard-line conservative security hawk.
The "enemy state clauses" refer mainly to Articles 53, 77 and 107 of the UN Charter, drafted after World War II in 1945 to apply to the wartime "enemy states" — the defeated Axis powers and their allies, including Japan, Germany and Italy. Article 53 allows regional organizations to take enforcement action, without prior Security Council authorization, against an enemy state that "renews" aggressive policy. Article 107 states that the Charter does not prevent action taken by the wartime victors against an enemy state as a result of World War II, including military occupation and war crimes trials. Article 77 permits territories detached from an enemy state to be placed under UN trusteeship. The clauses are widely regarded as an institutional safeguard, built into the postwar order, against a resurgence of militarism and fascism, and their historical roots trace directly to the postwar accountability framework established through the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials.
In her speech, Takaichi said that Japan, a UN member since 1956, has long taken an active role in peacekeeping and met its financial obligations, and that it is anachronistic — and damaging to its international standing — still to be labeled an "enemy state" in the Charter; she therefore called for the Charter to be amended promptly to remove the clauses. Citing Russia's invasion of Ukraine, she also argued for expanding the number of permanent members (currently the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Russia and China) and non-permanent members of the Security Council to better reflect today's international landscape. It was her first address to the General Assembly since becoming prime minister last October.
Japan has in fact pressed for the removal of the enemy state clauses since the 1990s, often in tandem with fellow defeated power Germany. In 1995, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 50/52, which "solemnly declared" the clauses obsolete. But because amending the Charter requires ratification by two-thirds of member states, including all five permanent Security Council members, that symbolic declaration has never been converted into a formal Charter amendment, and the clauses remain unchanged in the Charter's text to this day. Japan has also long teamed up with Germany, India and Brazil in the so-called "Group of Four" (G4) to lobby for an expanded Security Council, seeking to use the broader reform push to resolve its "enemy state" status while also pursuing a permanent seat of its own.
Responding to Takaichi's speech, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun told reporters that the enemy state clauses are a "vital institutional arrangement" that helps prevent fascism and militarism from ever again threatening international peace and security, and that China firmly opposes their deletion. He stressed that the clauses were established by the UN's founding members, including China, precisely out of deep reflection on the history of Japanese militarist aggression, and that this historical background remains as relevant today as ever.
Lü Chao, a researcher at the Liaoning Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times that Japan is in no position to demand the removal of the enemy state clauses, since it has never thoroughly reflected on or reckoned with its wartime aggression. He said that had Japan genuinely and deeply reckoned with its militarist history, the clauses would hardly still be a matter of controversy today. Takaichi's public push to delete the clauses, he argued, can be seen as a challenge to the postwar international order, and the political intent behind it deserves close scrutiny.
The speech did not occur in isolation. Last November, Takaichi suggested that Japan's Self-Defense Forces could become involved were a "contingency" to occur in the Taiwan Strait, a remark that triggered a serious rupture in China-Japan relations; China at the time invoked the enemy state clauses to argue it had legal grounds to take countermeasures against Japan. Meanwhile, Japan's defense budget has kept climbing: the fiscal year 2026 defense budget exceeds 9 trillion yen (about $58 billion), up 9.4 percent from the previous year, marking the fourth year of a five-year plan to raise defense spending to 2 percent of GDP — a target whose timeline has been moved up, under U.S. pressure, to March 2026. The new budget sharply increases spending on long-range "counterstrike" capability, including upgraded Type-12 surface-to-ship missiles with a range of about 1,000 kilometers. Chinese analysts argue that Japan's simultaneous push to shed its "enemy state" label and accelerate rearmament has put its neighbors on high alert.
Official Japanese documents reinforce this rearmament trend. In August, Japan's Ministry of Defense released its annual defense white paper, naming China, Russia and North Korea together as security threats to Japan for the first time and laying out detailed plans for the next phase of military buildup. China's Ministry of National Defense and Foreign Ministry have repeatedly criticized Tokyo for "hyping up the China threat," arguing that its real aim is to manufacture public justification for continued rearmament and revision of the pacifist constitution — reinforcing Beijing's view that the Takaichi government is using the Charter-amendment push as cover for an underlying military expansion.
Japan's proposal also drew a sharp rebuff from North Korea, which said that under the UN Charter, Japan "remains an enemy state," and called Tokyo's request to remove the clauses "shameful and ridiculous." Analysts say the enemy state clause dispute has become a flashpoint testing how regional countries weigh their view of Japan's acknowledgment of wartime responsibility against their present-day security concerns.
Because any Charter amendment requires the unanimous consent of all five permanent Security Council members, and China has explicitly opposed removing the clauses, the odds of a formal deletion in the near term remain extremely low. Still, analysts note that the Takaichi government's pairing of its Charter-amendment push with an expanding security posture — alongside a deepening Japan-U.S. alliance and record defense spending — signals a more assertive Japanese stance on both historical memory and regional security, one likely to remain a sensitive issue in China-Japan relations and Northeast Asia more broadly for some time to come.
