China’s increasing engagement with Pacific island nations is reducing Taiwan’s space on the international stage, a report released on Thursday by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) showed.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took power in 2013, China has increased its dealings with Pacific island nations by including them in its “Belt and Road Initiative” — a major diplomatic and economic development policy, the report said.
Such a move demonstrates Beijing’s geostrategic interest in the Pacific islands region, which is home to considerable natural resources and raw materials, it said.
“Beijing’s heightened engagement in the region in recent years is driven by its broader diplomatic and strategic interests, reducing Taiwan’s international space, and gaining access to raw materials and natural resources,” the report said.
The USCC was set up by the US Congress in 2000 to monitor, investigate and submit an annual report to the US Congress on the national security implications of the bilateral economic and trade relationship between Washington and Beijing.
Over the past five years, Beijing has “significantly” strengthened economic relations with Pacific island nations in trade, investment, development assistance and tourism, making China one of the major participants in the region’s development, the report said.
China’s engagement in the region has largely focused on its eight allies, but it has also extended its efforts with countries that have formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan, the report said.
During the tenure of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Beijing and Taipei reached a “diplomatic truce” to reduce competition between the two sides in the international area, it said, adding that since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party came to office in May 2016, China has poached Taiwan’s diplomatic partners.
Since Tsai’s election, five of the nations’ former allies — the Gambia, Sao Tome and Principe, Panama, the Dominican Republic and Burkina Faso — have switched recognition from Taipei to Beijing.
Taiwan’s six diplomatic partners from the Pacific islands are Kiribati, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Nauru, the Republic of Palau, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu.
In November last year, China reportedly stopped state-run tour groups from traveling to Palau in a bid to pressure it into severing ties with Taiwan, but that effort failed, the USCC report said.
“With the end of the diplomatic truce between Beijing and Taipei in 2016, there is an increasing potential of reigniting cross-Strait diplomatic competition in the Pacific Islands,” the report said.
“Growing economic incentives offered by China to Taiwan’s diplomatic partners could cause these countries to switch diplomatic recognition to Beijing, shrinking Taiwan’s international space and expanding China’s presence in the region,” it said. “Such a development would negatively affect US interests in the Indo-Pacific.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods