Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te will visit the self-governing island’s allies in the South Pacific, where rival China has been seeking diplomatic inroads. The Foreign Ministry announced Friday that Lai would travel from Nov 30 to Dec 6 to the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Palau.
The trip comes against the background of Chinese loans, grants, and security cooperation treaties with Pacific island nations that have aroused major concern in the US, New Zealand, Australia, and others over Beijing’s moves to assert military, political, and economic control over the region.
Under pressure from China, which claims Taiwan as its territory and threatens to annex it by force if needed, Taiwan has just 12 formal diplomatic allies. However, it retains strong contacts with dozens of other nations, including the US, its main source of diplomatic and military support.
China has sought to whittle away traditional alliances in the South Pacific, signing a security agreement with the Solomon Islands shortly after it broke ties with Taiwan and winning over Nauru just weeks after Lai’s election in January. Since then, China has been pouring money into infrastructure projects in its South Pacific allies, as it has around the world, in exchange for political support.
China objects strongly to such US stopovers by Taiwan’s leaders, as well as visits to the island by leading American politicians, terming them as violations of US commitments not to afford diplomatic status to Taiwan after Washington switched formal recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
With the number of its diplomatic partners declining under Chinese pressure, Taiwan has redoubled efforts to take part in international forums, even from the sidelines. It has also fought to retain what diplomatic status it holds, including refusing a demand from South Africa last month that it move its representative office in its former diplomatic ally out of the capital.
