Chinese diplomats are pressuring lawmakers from at least six countries not to attend a China-focused summit in Taiwan, participants said.
Politicians in Bolivia, Colombia, Slovakia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and one other Asian country that declined to be named, say they are receiving texts, calls and urgent requests for meetings that would conflict with their plans to travel to Taipei, in what they describe as efforts to isolate Taiwan.
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) summit officially begins tomorrow. The alliance is a group of hundreds of lawmakers from 35 countries concerned about how democracies approach Beijing.
Photo: Chiang Ying-ying, AP
The Associated Press spoke to the organizers and three lawmakers, and reviewed texts and e-mails sent by Chinese diplomats to the lawmakers asking whether they were planning to participate in the summit.
“I’m Wu, from Chinese Embassy,” read a message sent to Macedonian lawmaker Antonio Milososki. “We heard that you got an invitation from IPAC, will you attend the conference which will be held next week in Taiwan?”
In some cases, lawmakers described vague inquiries about their plans to travel to Taiwan. In other cases, the contact was more menacing.
Photo: I-Hwa Cheng, Bloomberg
One lawmaker said that Chinese diplomats messaged the head of her party with a demand to stop her from going.
“They contacted president of my political party, they ask him to stop me to travel to Taiwan,’’said Sanela Klarić, a member of parliament in Bosnia. ‘’They’re trying, in my country, to stop me from traveling…This is really not OK.’”
China routinely threatens retaliation against politicians and countries that show support for Taiwan, which has only informal relations with most nations due to Chinese diplomatic pressure.
Klaric said the pressure was unpleasant, but only steeled her determination to go on the trip.
“I really am fighting against countries or societies where the tool to manipulate and control peoples is fear,” she said, adding that it reminded her of threats and intimidation she faced during the Balkan wars in the 1990s. “I really hate the feeling when somebody is frightening you.”
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a statement yesterday, IPAC said it “deplores and condemns the PRC’s [People’s Republic of China’s] attempt to interfere in its annual summit.”
“Democratically elected lawmakers are free to visit and support causes of their choosing. This is the normal exercise of their rights and responsibilities as elected officials,” it said.
“The PRC’s actions around IPAC’s Summit are yet another example of their brazen efforts to curtail other nations’ democratic privileges and negate Taiwan’s rights to engage in legitimate diplomatic exchanges,” it added.
The alliance, which aims to coordinate diplomacy in response to perceived threats from Beijing, has long faced pressure from the Chinese government.
Some members have been sanctioned by Beijing, and in 2021 the group was targeted by Chinese state-sponsored hackers, a US indictment unsealed earlier this year showed.
However, alliance executive director Luke de Pulford said the pressure from Chinese officials the past few days had been unprecedented.
During past meetings in other locations, lawmakers were approached by Chinese diplomats only after they concluded. This year, the pressure has sharply escalated and appears to be a coordinated attempt to stop participants from attending.
“This is gross foreign interference. This is not normal diplomacy,” De Pulford said. “How would PRC officials feel if we tried to tell them about their travel plans, where they could and could not go? It’s absolutely outrageous that they think that they can interfere in the travel plans of foreign legislators,” he said.
Lawmakers from 25 countries are expected to attend this year’s summit, which is to feature high-level meetings with Taiwanese officials, a news release said.
China has been peeling off Taiwan’s diplomatic allies, often with promises of development aid, in a long-running competition between the nations that has swung in Beijing’s favor in the past few years.
The Pacific Island nation of Nauru switched recognition to Beijing earlier this year, a move that reduced Taiwan’s number of diplomatic allies to 12.
However, China’s at times heavy-handed approach has also triggered backlash.
In 2021, Beijing downgraded relations and blocked imports from Lithuania, an EU and NATO member, after the Baltic nation broke with diplomatic custom by agreeing that a Taiwanese representative office in its capital of Vilnius would bear the name Taiwan instead of Taipei, which some other countries use to avoid offending Beijing.
The following year, the EU adopted a resolution criticizing Beijing’s behavior toward Taiwan and took action against China at the WTO over the import restrictions.
Most of the lawmakers targeted appear to be from smaller countries, which De Pulford said was likely because Beijing “feels that they can get away with it.”
However, he added that the coercive tactics has only made participants more determined to participate.
Miriam Lexmann, a Slovakian member of the European Parliament whose party head was approached by Chinese diplomats, said the pressure underscored her reason for coming to Taiwan.
We want to “exchange information, ways how to deal with those challenges and threats which China represents to the democratic part of the world, and of course, to support Taiwan,” she said.
‘TAIWAN-FRIENDLY’: The last time the Web site fact sheet removed the lines on the US not supporting Taiwanese independence was during the Biden administration in 2022 The US Department of State has removed a statement on its Web site that it does not support Taiwanese independence, among changes that the Taiwanese government praised yesterday as supporting Taiwan. The Taiwan-US relations fact sheet, produced by the department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, previously stated that the US opposes “any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side; we do not support Taiwan independence; and we expect cross-strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means.” In the updated version published on Thursday, the line stating that the US does not support Taiwanese independence had been removed. The updated
‘CORRECT IDENTIFICATION’: Beginning in May, Taiwanese married to Japanese can register their home country as Taiwan in their spouse’s family record, ‘Nikkei Asia’ said The government yesterday thanked Japan for revising rules that would allow Taiwanese nationals married to Japanese citizens to list their home country as “Taiwan” in the official family record database. At present, Taiwanese have to select “China.” Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) said the new rule, set to be implemented in May, would now “correctly” identify Taiwanese in Japan and help protect their rights, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement. The statement was released after Nikkei Asia reported the new policy earlier yesterday. The name and nationality of a non-Japanese person marrying a Japanese national is added to the
AT RISK: The council reiterated that people should seriously consider the necessity of visiting China, after Beijing passed 22 guidelines to punish ‘die-hard’ separatists The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) has since Jan. 1 last year received 65 petitions regarding Taiwanese who were interrogated or detained in China, MAC Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday. Fifty-two either went missing or had their personal freedoms restricted, with some put in criminal detention, while 13 were interrogated and temporarily detained, he said in a radio interview. On June 21 last year, China announced 22 guidelines to punish “die-hard Taiwanese independence separatists,” allowing Chinese courts to try people in absentia. The guidelines are uncivilized and inhumane, allowing Beijing to seize assets and issue the death penalty, with no regard for potential
‘UNITED FRONT’ FRONTS: Barring contact with Huaqiao and Jinan universities is needed to stop China targeting Taiwanese students, the education minister said Taiwan has blacklisted two Chinese universities from conducting academic exchange programs in the nation after reports that the institutes are arms of Beijing’s United Front Work Department, Minister of Education Cheng Ying-yao (鄭英耀) said in an exclusive interview with the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) published yesterday. China’s Huaqiao University in Xiamen and Quanzhou, as well as Jinan University in Guangzhou, which have 600 and 1,500 Taiwanese on their rolls respectively, are under direct control of the Chinese government’s political warfare branch, Cheng said, citing reports by national security officials. A comprehensive ban on Taiwanese institutions collaborating or
RSS