Wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sipping an iced tea, Ongerung Kambes Kesolei sits at a veranda bar overlooking a hotel pool, under fans that slowly push humid air around on a quiet Sunday afternoon.
However, the calm of the scene is deceptive, for Kesolei is explaining that his small island home of Palau — a dot on the map in the northwest corner of the Pacific with a population of just over 20,000 people — has attracted the ire of one of the world’s most powerful nations and is now at the center of a geopolitical bunfight.
“They [China] want to weaken [President] Tsai Ing-wen [蔡英文] and that’s where Palau comes into play,” said Kesolei, the editor of one of Palau’s two newspapers.
Illustration: Yusha
Palau is one of just 17 countries that has refused to give up diplomatic relations with Taiwan and switch allegiance to China.
Palau, which was under US administration until its independence in 1994, struck up diplomatic relations with Taiwan in 1999 after a few years of what Kesolei calls “wooing” from both Taipei and Beijing.
The almost 20-year friendship has been strong, with Kesolei saying “every Palauan has a story” of interaction with Taiwan, whether traveling there for a holiday, education or medical treatment.
However, Taiwan’s allies are slowly being chipped away, as China puts the pressure on and seeks to penalize those that recognize self-ruled Taiwan, which Beijing considers a Chinese territory.
El Salvador switched its allegiance last month, and Burkina Faso and the Dominican Republic severed ties with Taiwan earlier this year.
Those countries that continue to recognize Taiwan — particularly the six in the Pacific, where China is seeking to increase its influence — are feeling the pressure.
For tiny Palau, where tourism accounts for 42.3 percent of GDP, this pressure has come in the form of what the locals call the “China ban.”
In November last year, the Chinese government ordered tour operators to stop selling package tours to Palau, with reports that doing so could lead to fines.
Some insist that Palau has always been a blacklisted destination, but that until recently the Chinese government turned a blind eye.
Evan Rees, Asia-Pacific analyst at Stratfor, says China uses such bans — as well as the granting and withholding of Approved Destination Status (ADS) to countries — as “part of a larger toolkit for compelling behavior.”
Last year, South Korea was the subject of such a travel ban, after a row over its deployment of a US missile defense system, which had a devastating impact on tourism to the country during the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
The bans affect package tours booked through travel agencies, which accounts for about 45 percent of all Chinese tourists, said Rees, although independent Chinese travelers are still able to visit “banned” destinations.
One Palauan-based Chinese businessman said the word “Palau” had also been blocked as an Internet search term in China.
The impact of the ban on Palau has been stark.
The number of tourists from China has plummeted so dramatically that one airline flying charter flights between China and Palau stopped flights at the end of last month, because “the Chinese government made Palau an illegal tour destination possibly and most likely due to lack of diplomatic status.”
Palauan tour operators and government officials bridle at suggestions the ban has brought Palau to its knees — there were still 9,000 visitor arrivals in July — but occupancy rates at hotels have dropped and businesses are hurting.
The pain of the ban has been particularly acute because it was immediately preceded by a staggering boom in tourism from China, with tourist arrivals from the country skyrocketing from 634 in 2008 — making up less than 1 percent of all visitors — to more than 91,000 in 2015 — 54 percent of all visitors.
At Elilai restuarant, which is heavily promoted as the “best restaurant in Palau” on billboards all over the island, I am the sole diner in a restaurant that could comfortably accommodate 50.
Waitress Donita Rose Cagaoan-Tipay is apologetic about the empty room, saying it was the result of a “ban from China,” although she says she does not know much more about it than that.
“I asked my friend who is a Chinese tour guide. He said Palau and China, the governments are having a fight,” she explains.
The empty restaurants are a far cry from 2014 and 2015, when charter flights from China began landing every day each carrying hundreds of tourists.
Leilani Reklai says the impact on the island was overwhelming.
“Guys were running around town buying land, getting cash in suitcases and buying everything in sight,” says Reklai, who is the president of Palau’s tourism association.
Reklai owned two boats that took tour groups to the Rock Islands, the most famous of Palau’s tourist attractions, which before the Chinese boom would go out four days a week during peak season.
“For almost one year my guys were going out seven days a week,” she says.
“Some people were saying: ‘This is the Chinese strategy, this is what they do, they are going to pour a lot of money in here, and get you addicted like it’s Coke and then turn off the faucet.’ But of course, money was louder so people weren’t listening,” Reklai says.
At 70, Francis Toribiong has had almost every job in the tourism business.
He says the dip hurt “everybody.”
Toribiong has been forced to sell a 25-bed hostel, but says he got off relatively lightly.
“There are so many young men who went to the development bank and borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy boats,” he says.
Now, demand has dropped so much that they are lucky if they are able to make enough to cover fuel and the loan repayments.
Despite the pain, most people agree the boom was unsustainable. At its peak in 2015, 169,000 tourists arrived in Palau and the country’s power, water and sewage systems struggled to cope. There was huge inflation, and the price of food and rent skyrocketed.
“There was an outcry,” says Ngiraibelas Tmetuchl, chairman of the Palau Visitors Authority, the government’s tourism marketing arm. “Prices of crabs went up, prices of fish, rents went up, people were displaced. There was an apartment that was going for $500, now they charge $1,200. There was a shortage of rooms. Apartments [were converted] from apartments to hotels.”
Kevin Mesebeluu, director of the bureau of tourism, says the China ban might be “a blessing in disguise,” giving Palau a chance to re-evaluate its approach to tourism.
“The president has been very clear about the direction,” he said. “High-value, low-impact sustainable tourism.”
Indeed, the country was heading down this path before the ban came into effect.
In 2015, Palauan President Tommy Remengesau announced a reduction in the number of charter flights between China and Palau in response to environmental and social concerns.
Reklani thinks this decision, which came into effect gradually, meant Palau escaped much more serious financial trouble.
“We definitely got out in time, this pain we’re going through, it would have been so much worse,” she says.
Since the China ban, Remengesau has reiterated his commitment to Taiwan, telling the Nikkei Asian Review that while China was an “important partner,” Palau had “more in common with Taiwan.”
A statement from his spokesperson was even more defiant, suggesting Palau would not bow to pressure.
“Palau is a country of laws, it is a democracy and we make our own decisions,” the spokesperson said.
However, there are others who would not mind seeing Palau switch diplomatic horses.
“It’s about time that we focus our interests and views towards the People’s Republic of China,” Palauan Senate President Hokkons Baules said in July at the groundbreaking ceremony for a Chinese-backed resort, the Island Times reported.
The Taiwan-China question is expected to be a key issue at the next presidential election in 2020.
However, Taiwanese Ambassador to Palau Wallace Chow (周民淦) is not worried about the relationship, saying it is “very solid.”
Speaking to the Guardian during an event for 25 Taiwanese youth ambassadors who are spending several days in Palau as part of a “soft power” mission, Chow says it is this “down-to-Earth, to the people, for the people” approach that will keep Palau onside.
However, Palauans might also be persuaded by the more than US$10 million in aid provided by Taiwan to the country each year, reminders of which are dotted around the island as signs announce that road or building projects are funded by Taiwanese grant money.
“I’m very confident that the Palauan people know who is their true partner and which side their bread is buttered,” Chow said.
Under the slowly moving fans, Kesolei says he does not expect a diplomatic switch any time soon.
“It’s part of our culture that we are very loyal to our friends,” he says.
Palauans also like the image of themselves as a country that is standing up to a superpower.
“Some of my social circle enjoy this limelight. Palau against China!” he says. “This tiny thing against the world’s biggest [country]! Some of my friends say: ‘If we have the power to decide, let’s be the last man standing with Taiwan, [other] countries will think we don’t just switch, we stay with our friends until the very end.’”
Chinese agents often target Taiwanese officials who are motivated by financial gain rather than ideology, while people who are found guilty of spying face lenient punishments in Taiwan, a researcher said on Tuesday. While the law says that foreign agents can be sentenced to death, people who are convicted of spying for Beijing often serve less than nine months in prison because Taiwan does not formally recognize China as a foreign nation, Institute for National Defense and Security Research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) said. Many officials and military personnel sell information to China believing it to be of little value, unaware that
Before 1945, the most widely spoken language in Taiwan was Tai-gi (also known as Taiwanese, Taiwanese Hokkien or Hoklo). However, due to almost a century of language repression policies, many Taiwanese believe that Tai-gi is at risk of disappearing. To understand this crisis, I interviewed academics and activists about Taiwan’s history of language repression, the major challenges of revitalizing Tai-gi and their policy recommendations. Although Taiwanese were pressured to speak Japanese when Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, most managed to keep their heritage languages alive in their homes. However, starting in 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) enacted martial law
“Si ambulat loquitur tetrissitatque sicut anas, anas est” is, in customary international law, the three-part test of anatine ambulation, articulation and tetrissitation. And it is essential to Taiwan’s existence. Apocryphally, it can be traced as far back as Suetonius (蘇埃托尼烏斯) in late first-century Rome. Alas, Suetonius was only talking about ducks (anas). But this self-evident principle was codified as a four-part test at the Montevideo Convention in 1934, to which the United States is a party. Article One: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: a) a permanent population; b) a defined territory; c) government;
The central bank and the US Department of the Treasury on Friday issued a joint statement that both sides agreed to avoid currency manipulation and the use of exchange rates to gain a competitive advantage, and would only intervene in foreign-exchange markets to combat excess volatility and disorderly movements. The central bank also agreed to disclose its foreign-exchange intervention amounts quarterly rather than every six months, starting from next month. It emphasized that the joint statement is unrelated to tariff negotiations between Taipei and Washington, and that the US never requested the appreciation of the New Taiwan dollar during the
RSS