Ever since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in 2016, China has intensified efforts to poach Taiwan’s remaining allies. Honduras’ decision on Sunday to sever a bilateral relationship of more than 80 years came as a major setback.
Beijing’s political and economic clout makes it an irresistible attraction to Taiwan’s few allies. When China offered huge amounts of financial assistance that Taiwan was unable to match, Honduras switched allegiance to pursue Chinese investment in costly infrastructure projects.
As a result, Taiwan has 13 diplomatic allies remaining, including the Central American nations of Belize and Guatemala.
Beijing’s hardball diplomacy displays an obsession to force the world’s acceptance of China’s dominance over Taiwan as the new geopolitical norm.
A key winner of this diplomatic warfare is the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Each diplomatic gain against Taiwan is a major departmental success. For each nation that changed diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, the ministry would secure additional resources to build a new embassy and launch new outreach programs abroad.
However, China’s diplomatic gains have outraged Taiwanese, who consider China more an aggressive bully than a peaceful neighbor. As next year’s presidential election nears, the hardball diplomacy is bound to jeopardize Beijing’s attempt to gain support for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and other pro-unification parties.
Despite the odds, all is not lost for Taiwan. Tsai’s transit through the US to Guatemala and Belize this week is immensely important as China squeezes Taiwan’s presence in international affairs.
The trip is an integral part of Tsai’s diplomatic activism, solidifying ties with allies in the western hemisphere and countering China’s mounting pressure.
In light of China’s missile launches and military drills following then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taipei in August last year, US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has agreed to meet Tsai in Los Angeles. The high-profile meeting not only shows strong bipartisan support for Taiwan in Washington, but also enables Tsai to engage with top national policymakers on US soil.
At a time when the US is consolidating its Indo-Pacific agenda, it finds a natural partner in Taiwan.
This new thinking represents a bold US decision to include Taiwan into a rules-based system of sovereign nation-states, while maintaining a delicate balance of power in cross-strait relations.
Once the dust of the current diplomatic crisis settles, Taiwan and the US must formalize their growing ties in a manner that they deserve.
Only by doing so will Taiwan reaffirm its international status and participate in global alliances.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee is a professor of history at Pace University in New York.
As the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) reach the point of confidence that they can start and win a war to destroy the democratic culture on Taiwan, any future decision to do so may likely be directly affected by the CCP’s ability to promote wars on the Korean Peninsula, in Europe, or, as most recently, on the Indian subcontinent. It stands to reason that the Trump Administration’s success early on May 10 to convince India and Pakistan to deescalate their four-day conventional military conflict, assessed to be close to a nuclear weapons exchange, also served to
The recent aerial clash between Pakistan and India offers a glimpse of how China is narrowing the gap in military airpower with the US. It is a warning not just for Washington, but for Taipei, too. Claims from both sides remain contested, but a broader picture is emerging among experts who track China’s air force and fighter jet development: Beijing’s defense systems are growing increasingly credible. Pakistan said its deployment of Chinese-manufactured J-10C fighters downed multiple Indian aircraft, although New Delhi denies this. There are caveats: Even if Islamabad’s claims are accurate, Beijing’s equipment does not offer a direct comparison
After India’s punitive precision strikes targeting what New Delhi called nine terrorist sites inside Pakistan, reactions poured in from governments around the world. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) issued a statement on May 10, opposing terrorism and expressing concern about the growing tensions between India and Pakistan. The statement noticeably expressed support for the Indian government’s right to maintain its national security and act against terrorists. The ministry said that it “works closely with democratic partners worldwide in staunch opposition to international terrorism” and expressed “firm support for all legitimate and necessary actions taken by the government of India
Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo (顧立雄) has said that the armed forces must reach a high level of combat readiness by 2027. That date was not simply picked out of a hat. It has been bandied around since 2021, and was mentioned most recently by US Senator John Cornyn during a question to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at a US Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Tuesday. It first surfaced during a hearing in the US in 2021, when then-US Navy admiral Philip Davidson, who was head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said: “The threat [of military
RSS