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China's Diplomatic Gain Is Taiwan's Loss
Taiwan's vice president, Annette Lu, and Paraguay's president, Nicanor Duarte, embrace Saturday during a visit to a housing project built with Taiwanese funds in San Lorenzo.
(By Jorge Saenz -- Associated Press)
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His successor restored ties to Taiwan in 1990 and Ortega has displayed a friendlier attitude this time around. But he also has demanded more economic assistance, including help for a $40 million hydroelectric plant, telecommunications aid and forgiveness of about $50 million in debt.
Huang said Taiwan's tool of persuasion in retaining such allies is its embrace of shared political values, such as democracy, human rights and freedom. But he acknowledged that the argument carries less weight now than it did in the 1960s. Then, when the United States still recognized Taipei and mainland China was an ideological outcast, Taiwan had ties with 67 nations. By 1979 the count was down to 22.
Although Taiwan officials cringe at charges of checkbook diplomacy, their practical appeal these days is economic. In Nicaragua, for instance, Taiwan has become the largest foreign investor, with $260 million in projects accounting for 25,000 jobs.
But China, with its booming economy, also has found new friendships through foreign aid. Some small Caribbean and Pacific island countries have bounced back and forth between Taipei and Beijing several times on the basis of such aid offers, running a sort of auction for diplomatic loyalties.
China's other great asset, Huang noted, is the promise of trade, particularly its worldwide search for oil and minerals that he qualified as "neo-mercantilism." Chad's decision to break with Taiwan two years ago, for instance, was tied to a Chinese offer to explore for oil.
President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica, in explaining his decision to abandon Taiwan, said the promise of trade relations with China was just too great to ignore.
Both the Chinese and Taiwanese governments also have been widely reported to resort to bribery. The reports, denied with equal vehemence in Beijing and Taipei, usually have emerged in the form of charges leveled by one political faction against another after a switch.
The Costa Rican newspaper La Nacion revealed several years ago that $240,000 paid by Taiwan to the private Association for the Development of Foreign Policy in Costa Rica was used in part to pay $1,500 a month to the daughter of then-President Abel Pacheco. Pacheco acknowledged the payments but insisted they were legitimate because they were for his daughter's services at the Costa Rican Embassy in Mexico. At the same time, he allowed as how such private associations needed more supervision.
