Continual visits of foreign delegations since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated the rising importance of Taiwan in the eyes of other democratic countries, US current affairs Web site Axios said on Friday.
“Democratic stakeholders increasingly see Taiwan as playing a key role in the global struggle between democracy and authoritarianism,” Taipei-based writer Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian said in the article, titled “All roads lead to Taipei.”
Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the threats China is posing to European security, Taiwan’s success in tackling COVID-19 has prompted some countries to reconsider constraints of following a “one China” policy, Allen-Ebrahimian said.
Photo: Tyrone Siu, Reuters
Taiwan is increasingly being seen as a place worth learning from, “not just an underprivileged party that needs to be saved by whoever is visiting,” Marcin Jerzewski, an analyst at the Taipei branch of the European Values Center for Security Policy, was quoted as saying.
The foreign delegations arriving in Taiwan have included officials with higher rankings than those who visited before the COVID-19 pandemic, the report said, adding that the visits were often initiated by the delegations rather than invitations.
Jerzewski referred to this as “a big qualitative change.”
The article cited the example of a visit in 2021 by members of the European Parliament’s subcommittee on foreign interference in democratic processes, the first official visit by members of the parliament.
There were also more exchanges with executive branches from many countries, which have traditionally been considered more sensitive, the article said, citing a telephone conversation in 2020 between then-Polish minister of health Lukasz Szumowski and then-minister of health and welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), as well as a call President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) had last month with Czech president-elect Petr Pavel.
Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation Executive Director Alan Yang (楊昊) said the foundation has arranged dozens of foreign visits to Taiwan as part of Tsai’s New Southbound Policy.
Countries making outreach to Taiwan are using the opportunity to form closer ties with other countries in the regions, such as Singapore and Australia, “making closer ties to Taiwan part of a larger Indo-Pacific strategy of diversifying engagement beyond just China,” Allen-Ebrahimian said.
US Senator Todd Young, who visited Taiwan last month, was quoted in the article as saying that supporting Taiwan and opposing a Chinese invasion is a cross-party consensus in the US Congress.
“After visiting, I am even more convinced of the need for deeper engagement and cooperation between our two countries moving forward,” he said.
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