The Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday said Nigeria has decided to play along with a Chinese “peremptory political scheme,” after the west African country announced that it would no longer recognize Taiwan as a nation and would cease all diplomatic relations in accordance with the “one China” principle.
The ministry in a news release accused Nigeria of seeking to confuse the international community by declaring that it would honor the “one China” principle and sever diplomatic relations with Taipei, as the two nations have never established formal diplomatic ties.
“The ministry strongly protests and deplores the Nigerian government’s cooperation with China to carry out a politically motivated, unreasonable, peremptory and brutal scheme,” it said.
Photo: Reuters
The strongly worded statement followed a joint news conference by Nigerian Minister of Foreign Affairs Geoffrey Onyeama and visiting Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) in Abuja on Wednesday, at which they said that Taipei’s office in the capital would be shut down and moved to Lagos, Nigeria.
“Taiwan will not have any diplomatic representation in Nigeria and also they will be moving to Lagos, to the extent that they function as a trade mission with a skeletal staff,” the state-run News Agency of Nigeria quoted Onyeama as saying.
Nigerian officials and organizations have also been banned from having official exchanges with Taiwan.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
At a news conference in Taipei yesterday morning, ministry spokeswoman Eleanor Wang (王珮玲) urged Nigeria to leave room for follow-up negotiations.
“In an effort to promote a substantial trade relationship, Taiwan and Nigeria inked a memorandum of understanding on mutually establishing trade missions on Nov. 21, 1990,” she said.
In 1991, Taiwan established a trade mission in the then-Nigerian capital, Lagos, before moving it to its new capital, Abuja, after reaching a consensus with the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in August 2001, Eleanor Wang said, adding that since then China has been pressuring Nigeria to relocate Taipei’s office back to Lagos.
Beijing has stepped up efforts to suppress Taipei in the international arena as part of punitive measures over President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) refusal to acknowledge the so-called “1992 consensus.”
The “1992 consensus” refers to a tacit understanding between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party that both sides of the Taiwan Strait acknowledge that there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means. Former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) in 2006 admitted to making up the term in 2000.
Later yesterday, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Shih-ying (蔡適應) said that China’s nonsensical tactics were not conducive to improving cross-strait ties and were beneath the great power Beijing claims to be.
The lawmaker went on to ridicule Nigeria’s announcement, saying: “I did not know you could break up with someone without even being in a relationship with them in the first place.”
An internal Nigerian government document detailing the decision had been available since last week, Tsai Shih-ying said, calling on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to step up its efforts to safeguard Taiwan’s international status.
Separately yesterday, in Guatemala, Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺), who is accompanying the president on her ongoing visit to Central America, said China’s pressuring of Taiwan would only raise hackles.
Beijing’s return to its old track — the use of pressure or intimidation — would only antagonize Taiwanese and would not be favorable to the development of cross-strait relations, he added.
“The existence of the Republic of China is an indisputable fact. Applying pressure and intimidation will not change that fact,” Huang said.
Additional reporting by CNA
Two US House of Representatives committees yesterday condemned China’s attempt to orchestrate a crash involving Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim’s (蕭美琴) car when she visited the Czech Republic last year as vice president-elect. Czech local media in March last year reported that a Chinese diplomat had run a red light while following Hsiao’s car from the airport, and Czech intelligence last week told local media that Chinese diplomats and agents had also planned to stage a demonstrative car collision. Hsiao on Saturday shared a Reuters news report on the incident through her account on social media platform X and wrote: “I
SHIFT PRIORITIES: The US should first help Taiwan respond to actions China is already taking, instead of focusing too heavily on deterring a large-scale invasion, an expert said US Air Force leaders on Thursday voiced concerns about the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) missile capabilities and its development of a “kill web,” and said that the US Department of Defense’s budget request for next year prioritizes bolstering defenses in the Indo-Pacific region due to the increasing threat posed by China. US experts said that a full-scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan is risky and unlikely, with Beijing more likely to pursue coercive tactics such as political warfare or blockades to achieve its goals. Senior air force and US Space Force leaders, including US Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink and
‘BUILDING PARTNERSHIPS’: The US military’s aim is to continue to make any potential Chinese invasion more difficult than it already is, US General Ronald Clark said The likelihood of China invading Taiwan without contest is “very, very small” because the Taiwan Strait is under constant surveillance by multiple countries, a US general has said. General Ronald Clark, commanding officer of US Army Pacific (USARPAC), the US Army’s largest service component command, made the remarks during a dialogue hosted on Friday by Washington-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Asked by the event host what the Chinese military has learned from its US counterpart over the years, Clark said that the first lesson is that the skill and will of US service members are “unmatched.” The second
Czech officials have confirmed that Chinese agents surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March 2024 and planned a collision with her car as part of an “unprecedented” provocation by Beijing in Europe. Czech Military Intelligence learned that their Chinese counterparts attempted to create conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, which “did not go beyond the preparation stage,” agency director Petr Bartovsky told Czech Radio in a report yesterday. In addition, a Chinese diplomat ran a red light to maintain surveillance of the Taiwanese