Five countries have this year canceled visa-free entry for Taiwanese due to pressure from China, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday. The number of countries offering preferential visa treatment to holders of Taiwan passports dropped from 171 at the end of last year to 166 in April, the Central News Agency reported, citing data from a report by the National Audit Office. Giving examples of countries mentioned in the report, it said that Botswana had removed Taiwan from the drop-down menu on its e-visa application system, while Colombia last year canceled visa-free entry for Taiwan passport holders.
It cannot be overstated how unimportant these changes are for Taiwanese travelers in general. A survey conducted by Insight-Xplorer Ltd showed that in 2019, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 69.1 percent of Taiwanese travelers visited countries in Northeast Asia other than China, 35.9 percent visited China (including Macau and Hong Kong) and 29 percent visited Southeast Asia. Only 2.6 percent visited South America and 0.9 percent visited Africa.
Ministry of Transportation and Communications statistics show that 4.9 million Taiwanese visited Japan that year, making it the top destination for local travelers, while 4 million visited China. Statistics for last year show that as travel recovered following the pandemic, the top destinations remained the same, with 4.23 million Taiwanese visiting Japan last year, and 1.76 million visiting China. Meanwhile, Botswana’s government data show that 1.18 million foreigners visited the African country last year, and nearly half of them were from other African countries.
So what does China hope to achieve by pressuring these countries into dropping visa-free travel for Taiwanese? Most likely, the measure is part of Beijing’s cognitive warfare efforts against Taiwan. China is running out of diplomatic allies to poach from Taiwan, so it is seeking to chip away at the nation’s international space in other ways. Botswana receives funding from China under the Belt and Road Initiative and has nothing to lose by canceling visa-free treatment for Taiwan, which was effectively nothing more than a symbolic policy to begin with. Colombia, while not a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, is a recipient of several Chinese investments and would be motivated to cancel agreements with Taiwan in favor of keeping those investments.
Elsewhere, Taiwan continues to enjoy favorable treatment. Taiwanese can travel visa-free to the US and the Schengen Area, and Taiwan last year signed the first agreement under the US-Taiwan Initiative on 21st Century Trade. Trade between the EU and Taiwan increased by 42 percent between 2020 and last year, then-European Economic and Trade Office head Filip Grzegorzewski said last month. So, there is little for Taiwanese to be concerned about. They can still travel to 166 countries without a visa (barely fewer than the 186 countries US citizens can travel to visa-free), and Taiwan is seeing relations improve with the countries that matter most to it.
The proper framing of this issue is important for countering China’s attempts to damage public morale. When reporting on the Taiwan-related policies of countries that are relatively insignificant to Taiwan in terms of trade and tourism, the foreign ministry should emphasize that while it regrets such decisions, it is focused on the meaningful and mutually beneficial relations Taiwan is engaged in with the US, the EU, Japan and other important partners. As the US is very instrumental in many of those relations, it is important that Taiwan continues to work closely with the US and seek its support in pursuing international agreements.
Ultimately, the government should encourage the US to formally recognize Taiwan, which could spur recognition by other countries. Failing that, Taiwan would continue to pursue closer non-official arrangements with other partners.
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS