On March 31, the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs released declassified diplomatic records from 1995 that drew wide domestic media attention. One revelation stood out: North Korea had once raised the possibility of diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
In a meeting with visiting Chinese officials in May 1995, as then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) prepared for a visit to South Korea, North Korean officials objected to Beijing’s growing ties with Seoul and raised Taiwan directly.
According to the newly released records, North Korean officials asked why Pyongyang should refrain from developing relations with Taiwan while China and South Korea were expanding high-level exchanges. They warned that if Jiang went ahead with the visit, North Korea could respond by considering formal diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
Taiwan was clearly present in North Korea’s strategic imagination and was not a random name for Pyongyang to invoke in May 1995. Just a month earlier, in April 1995, Taiwan’s flag carrier, China Airlines, operated a chartered direct flight from Taipei to Pyongyang.
Taiwan-North Korea ties have long existed. Taiwan and the northern half of the Korean Peninsula were both once part of the Japanese empire, sharing an imperial space that created channels of movement, education and connection.
Cho Myung-ha, a Korean independence activist from Hwanghae Province in present-day North Korea, lived in Taichung, where he attempted to assassinate Kuni Kuniyoshi, an Imperial Japanese Army general and father-in-law of then-Japanese emperor Hirohito. Meanwhile, Jeong Du-hyeon studied medicine at Taihoku Imperial University, now National Taiwan University, before later becoming a prominent North Korean medical leader, one of the drafters of the North Korean constitution and a Central Committee member of the Workers’ Party of North Korea.
There have reportedly been high-level visits between Taipei and Pyongyang. According to 2024 research by academic Zou Zhong-su (鄒仲蘇), from late 1991 to early 1992, then-North Korean vice premier Kim Tal-hyon visited Taiwan to discuss opening representative offices in Taipei and Pyongyang, as South Korea and China had already opened reciprocal offices in Beijing and Seoul in 1991 before establishing formal diplomatic relations in 1992.
In 1992, then-North Korean Workers’ Party economics department minister Choe Su-gil also visited Taiwan and held talks in Taipei with then-political vice minister John Chiang (蔣孝嚴) and then-central bank governor Hsieh Sen-chung (謝森中).
As late as October 2012, a senior North Korean tourism official, Jo Seong-gyu, visited Taiwan.
On Taipei’s side, Taiwanese figures such as senior Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) financier Liu Tai-ying (劉泰英) and former Control Yuan member Lin Chiu-shan (林秋山) also traveled to North Korea multiple times as part of Taiwanese delegations.
The most sustained exchanges between Taiwan and North Korea have taken place through sports and continue today, including at events such as the AFC Women’s Asian Cup in Australia last month.
One of the best-known examples of Taiwan-North Korea contact through sports was the romance between North Korean judoka Lee Chang-soo (李昌壽) and Taiwanese judoka Chen Ling-chen (陳鈴真). The two first met at the 1989 World Judo Championships in Yugoslavia. Their relationship eventually led Lee to escape North Korea to reunite with Chen, and he later coached Taiwan’s national judo team.
According to the Global Taiwan Institute’s July 2020 publication, Taiwan was North Korea’s fourth-largest export destination in 2016, behind China, India and the Philippines.
However, the Taiwan-North Korea relationship was curtailed after Taipei announced a comprehensive ban on trade with North Korea on September 26, 2017, in line with international sanctions following Pyongyang’s nuclear test.
Even so, tourism-related contact continued until the COVID-19 pandemic. North Korea’s tourism office opened in Taipei in July 2018 amid a broader diplomatic thaw following the June 2018 Singapore summit between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.
Twenty-five years ago, in May 2001, the Taipei Times published an op-ed titled “Taiwan can help Korean peace.” It said Taiwanese visitors to North Korea were welcomed at the time.
Unlike most of North Korea’s neighbors, such as South Korea and Japan, Taiwan did not carry the same historical grievances with Pyongyang, allowing more room for engagement that could promote peace and cooperation on the Korean Peninsula.
Such engagement, the piece said, could help ease Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation and raise its international standing.
That argument was made in a very different strategic environment, before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks in the US and the return of hardened great-power rivalry, including what some now call a “second cold war.”
Today, any such argument must be read against a harsher reality. That reality was on display in Beijing on September 3 last year, when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appeared together at the Victory Day parade in Tiananmen Square in a public show of alignment.
Even such alignments can contain openings. In 2016, North Korea reportedly offered submarine designs and air-independent propulsion technology for Taiwan’s indigenous submarine effort, the program that would later produce the Hai Kun (海鯤). Taipei did not take up the offer, but it suggested Pyongyang could pursue interests that might undermine China’s security position by strengthening Taiwan’s defense capabilities. The Beijing camp contains cracks that Taipei should be able to read and exploit.
Taiwan and North Korea were never especially close, but neither was irrelevant to the other. For years, Taiwan remained in Pyongyang’s strategic vision as a source of trade, people-to-people exchange and a possible channel for engagement, perhaps even a formal one.
The 1995 declassified file is a reminder that this overlooked relationship was real. That history, however limited, could still inform Taiwan’s strategic thinking in the years ahead.
Alan Jeong is a writer on politics, policy and foreign affairs based in South Korea.
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