China aims to elbow Taiwan out of the Pacific
With the coming to power of Xi Jinping in 2013, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has adopted a pugnacious foreign policy from direct intervention in Hong Kong to militarising the South China Sea, trade war with the US and border dispute with India. All are aimed at showcasing its military might and economic power as well as an emerging global power willing to change the established status quo and introduce its own new global order.
In the Blue Pacific region, Beijing has been expanding its footprint in an unprecedented manner so much so that it nullifies its earlier claim of a “peaceful rise”. As PRC continues to pursue its aggressive foreign policy, Taiwan accuses it of practicing “authoritarian expansionism” in the region. In a statement, the Taiwanese foreign minister stated that his country does not wish the Pacific region turning into yet another South China Sea where PRC is blamed for “bullying and harassing” its weaker neighbours.
Furthermore, Beijing is relentlessly investing in countries that have diplomatic relations with Taipei with an aim to coax them relinquish their diplomatic ties. This policy has, by and large, paid off when the two island nations of Kiribati and Solomon Islands cut their diplomatic relations with Taiwan in September 2019. The decision to switch diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing has significantly reduced Taiwan’s diplomatic allies in the region.
Currently only four countries such as Palau, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Nauru maintain their diplomatic allegiance to Taiwan. All other countries in the Pacific totalling fourteen have recognised the “One China Policy”, which is a diplomatic acknowledgement that there is only one Chinese government. Under this policy, China views Taiwan as a breakaway province, which has to be reunified with the mainland either through diplomatic pressure or use of military force should Taipei unilaterally declare independence.
Historically, the Sino-Taiwan diplomatic rivalry goes back to 1970s when the Republic of China (ROC) or Taiwan, lost its United Nations (UN) Seat to PRC. Ever since, the two Asiatic economic powerhouses have been competing for diplomatic recognition around the world both at bilateral and multilateral levels. Beijing has made impressive inroads in isolating Taipei diplomatically, thanks to its UN leverage and generous amounts of foreign aid to the cash-starved developing and underdeveloped countries particularly in the Pacific. The Pacific island nations have, arguably, been active creators of the Sino-Taiwan diplomatic rivalry by playing one donor against the other in a bid to secure a sustainable flow of foreign aid, foreign direct investment, tourism and bilateral trade and commerce.
Bearing the condition-based characteristic of diplomatic allegiance of the Pacific island nations (PICs) in mind, PRC has poured colossal sums of money into the PICs in order to heavily in-debt them so that they cannot switch. There are reports that almost all of the island nations have borrowed over 50% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from China. This Chinese debt-trap diplomacy, as it is commonly known, which unfairly strengthens China’s influence and diplomatic clout in the region, is reducing Taiwan’s diplomatic space. To slow the pace of Chinese growth in the region, Taipei is urging the United States and other like-minded countries to “push back strongly” against Beijing’s intentions to diminish Taiwan’s space in the PICs.
China, however, is relentlessly and aggressively pressing ahead to expand its presence by diversifying its multi-dimensional activities in the Pacific. From a base of couple of million dollars two decades ago, today China is the second largest donor country to the island nations by spending US$1.6 billion since 2011. Switching of the Solomon Islands and Kiribati’s allegiance to China exemplifies the fact that Chinese have been effective in luring Taiwan’s allies to recognise the One China Policy and abandon Taipei’s quest for independence.
After the election of the China-friendly Ma Ying-Jeou as Taiwan’s president in 2008, Beijing and Taipei inked a number of key trade and economic deals, which marked the beginning of an unofficial diplomatic truce. PRC tried to convince ROC of its friendly intentions after many decades of hostility and diplomatic rivalry. However, with the election of president Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, Taipei has come under pressure from China. The latter accuses president Tsai of pushing for the island nation’s independence, which is a red line for China. Meanwhile, Taiwan has accused Beijing of trying to interfere in its presidential election in 2019 as president Tsai was seeking re-election.
For China it is intolerable to have an independent ROC in its immediate neighbourhood. It is in this spirit that Beijing is spreading its sphere of influence globally through its multi-pronged investments to exert excessive amount of diplomatic pressure on Taipei to give up its independence ambitions. In the Pacific region, Taiwan’s space is indeed shrinking and given that China is generously funding various development projects, is ostensibly encouraging Taipei’s allies to switch sides.
It has also been observed that the level of Taiwan’s foreign aid has shrunk markedly over the years, which allegedly convinced Kiribati and Solomon Islands to declare their allegiance to PRC in order to secure Chinese investments and address their burgeoning economic needs. With an enormous need for social development and limited economic means, the PICs depend heavily on the interests of competing powers in the region.
When the two island nations abandoned Taipei last year, PRC signed a number of secret economic deals with them. China and Kiribati had diplomatic relations until 2003, but it later ditched Beijing in favour of Taipei. Kiribati is a strategic country where China had built its space tracking station, which monitored China’s first manned space flight. The two Pacific nations of Kiribati and Solomon Islands lie in strategic waters that have been dominated by the US and its regional allies since World War II. However, China’s moves to expand its interests in the region has alarmed the US and its allies.
In conclusion, PRC is ambitiously marching towards becoming a global superpower and a regional hegemon. Against that backdrop, Beijing aims to remove, no matter how small, all the barriers from its path. Domination in the South China Sea by first creating artificial islands and then militarising them, bringing Hong Kong under the ambit of the mainland and neutralising Taiwan’s quest for independence are some of the key regional barriers that Beijing intends to eliminate one after the other.
As for Taiwan, it now has formal relations with 15 countries in Latin America, Africa and the Pacific region, which are mostly poor and aid dependent nations. After buying off the diplomatic loyalty of two Pacific countries, China has signalled that it will go after the rest of Taiwan’s allies not only in the Pacific but also other parts of the world. With the current pace that China is going, it will not take long to bring all Taipei’s allies in its orbit. Only time will tell what fate the island nation will have.
Picture Credit: TFIPost
(Saber Salem is Doctoral Research Fellow with the Jindal School of International Affairs, OP Jindal Global University. His areas of interests are Pacific region, climate change, climate migration and foreign aid diplomacy.The views expressed are personal)
