The issue of calling Taiwan by its proper name indicates the significant degree of control that China wields over many facets of the U.N.’s work.
One of the countries that officially recognizes Taiwan said that the island democracy’s allies notched a small diplomatic victory: In an annual report on sustainability, those allies may now refer to Taiwan by its name, rather than by the U.N.’s pro-Beijing nomenclature for the country that implies it is part of China.
“That’s a success story that we’re very proud of,” said Inga Rhonda King, the ambassador of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to the U.N., during a press conference in front of the organization’s headquarters yesterday. Taiwan is recognized by 13 countries, a list that’s grown smaller as China has poached several of its former allies, including Honduras, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, in recent years.
The issue, though seemingly an obscure diplomatic dispute, demonstrates the significant degree of control that China has wielded over many facets of the U.N.’s work in New York and elsewhere.
After the election of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, China ramped up its lobbying to exclude Taiwan from the U.N. Tsai is viewed as an advocate for the island’s independence and thus one of the Chinese Communist Party’s top enemies.
Some examples include the U.N. leadership’s adoption of China’s nomenclature for Taiwan, referring to it variously as “Taiwan, China” or merely as “China.” It has also interpreted a 1971 U.N. General Assembly resolution that expelled the nationalist Republic of China government from the organization as a blanket ban on the entry of any individual holding a Taiwanese passport to U.N. premises.
Taiwanese officials and other observers say that this exclusion from the U.N. matters partly because, in the event of a crisis provoked by China, they’d be blocked from making a case directly to other nations, as Ukrainian leaders have done. Taiwan’s government also argues that it has a lot to contribute to international development efforts.
The U.N.’s Beijing-aligned policies have extended even to the annual “Voluntary National Review” reports that member states file each year to detail their progress on implementing the U.N.’s flagship Sustainable Development Goals. The submission of those reports is overseen by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which is run by a Chinese national, Liu Zhenmin, and viewed as a bastion of Beijing’s influence within the U.N. system.
Since 2018, countries that have official relations with Taipei have been barred from submitting reports that refer only to Taiwan, with DESA officials telling them that they must use the U.N.’s preferred nomenclature. Most of Taiwan’s official partners are small developing nations that receive economic-development assistance from Taiwan and therefore note its support in their VNR submissions.
Several of those countries started to raise the issue in 2018 as part of an annual campaign to advocate Taiwan’s inclusion in U.N. activities that includes an annual letter to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
King explained yesterday that their lobbying had finally succeeded this year: “Through our advocacy, the Secretary general has since ensured that our VNRs are uploaded because it’s our sovereign right to say as we please in our statements.”
She added that Guterres “has ensured that there’s no longer a block on our statements. There is a disclaimer, but our statements are now uploaded.”
The change probably occurred in August, a source familiar with the diplomatic campaign told NR. After St. Kitts and Nevis, another one of the countries that recognizes Taiwan, tried to upload a statement referring to Taiwan, an official from DESA attempted to get the country to change its language, but it refused to do so.
This modest victory within the U.N. bureaucracy followed another promising sign for Taiwan’s prospects at Turtle Bay. During a press conference last month, Deputy Secretary General Amina Mohammed said that member states need to find a way to end the country’s exclusion from participating in U.N. sustainable-development efforts because “every person matters, whether it’s Taiwan or otherwise.”
Although a U.N. spokesman subsequently doubled down on the organization’s pro-Beijing approach to the Taiwan issue, Mohammed later declined to retract her statement when an employee of a Chinese state television station pressed her on it during another press conference.
Taiwan’s allies told reporters yesterday that they plan to stick with the country, even as Beijing keeps trying to get them to switch their allegiances. “We will continue to be here as long as they are excluded,”said Carlos Fuller, Belize’s ambassador to the global body. “We will be here along with them to ensure that at the end of the day, at the end of the year, at the end of the decade, they will get in.”