Why Forcing Taiwan to Move from Pretoria is not in SA’s Interests

South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Dirco) wrote to the government of Taiwan in October 2024 instructing the Taipei Liaison Office to shut up shop in Pretoria and move to Johannesburg under a different name by the end of February 2025. This request was reiterated by Dirco in a subsequent letter setting an eviction deadline of the end of March.

Contemporary Taiwan emerged in 1949 with the end of the Chinese Civil War. Two million refugees, many from the nationalist Kuomintang government fled communist control, establishing the government of the Republic of China. In a quirk of Cold War history, the island represented the mainland in the United Nations.

But under UN Security Council Resolution 2758 passed in 1971, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was recognised as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations”. A slow contest for official status has left only 12 countries worldwide recognising Taiwan over the PRC, since Beijing will not allow recognition of both simultaneously and Taiwan hasn’t declared independence.

This ambiguity — while it has worked for both in economic terms, with Taiwan one of the largest investors and trade partners with the mainland — has led more recently to tension, with Chinese President Xi Jinping vowing to reunite the country and rapidly building up a navy and air force that can do so.

South Africa made the inevitable switch to recognising China from Taiwan in 1998, the matter handled under an agreement by which the Taiwan Liaison Office was opened in Pretoria to replace the embassy, and (at the time) offices maintained in Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town where there were previously consuls.

Taiwanese diplomats would, in terms of this agreement, enjoy diplomatic privileges including rates-free rentals, diplomatic corps number plates and diplomatic immunity. It was in the spirit of the overall relationship an ambiguous unofficial but official relationship, a way of partly satisfying honour.

A Sinophilic Dirco now wants to change this status, presumably to please Beijing, and no doubt aware of the precedent that this would set for other BRICS countries. If not Pretoria, why should Moscow have a Taiwanese office, for instance, or Brasilia, Riyadh, New Delhi and Jakarta among others?

There are at least three reasons why this move is a bad idea for South Africa.

Diverging values

The first is about the character of the country South Africa is trying to please. Yes, it is the world’s second-largest economy (behind the US), but its values are a long way from those expressed in South Africa’s Constitution. Where SA (and Taiwan) is a multiparty democracy, China is a one-party autocracy.

Xi has condemned “Western” (but also South African) values including the rule of law, press freedom and constitutionalism. While SA stands for changes in the system of global governance, this presumably is not the same as Beijing desires which, given its record at home, can only mean, as Freedom House has argued, “the demolition of democratic standards, universal human rights norms and the principle of free expression”.

Where SA stands for a free press, under Xi, “The regime has rapidly expanded the scope of its repression, engulfing a numbing procession of lawyers, journalists, bloggers, women’s advocates, minority rights campaigners and religious believers who have been detained, placed under house arrest, disappeared, or formally sentenced to prison.”

Whereas political prisoners went out of vogue with apartheid in SA, China is the global leader in this sinister category, with an estimated 1,600 prisoners of conscience held in its jails. Where SA has stopped capital punishment, China executes an average of 8,000 people every year.

Where SA is at pains to protect minority interests, China represses minorities at home, treating Uighurs, Tibetans and other groups with more than contempt. Where SA is committed to the peaceful resolution of conflict, China supports Russia’s violence in Ukraine and is on its own land-grabbing exercise in the South China Sea.

We also know that pollution in China is among the world’s worst and that inequality is a defining feature of Chinese development, all matters that seize Pretoria, at least rhetorically.

We are, thankfully, not alike.

So what, goes the argument, since China is a large market, a large investor in SA, and has delivered trend-setting growth year in, year out? (Disclosure: This is precisely an argument that one of us — Dr Mills — made in motivating for the switch in relations in the mid-1990s.) With nearly $50-billion in two-way trade, China is now SA’s largest single trading partner and a growing investor, not least in extractives. But that should not mean abandoning Taiwanese interests in SA.

A second reason is that there are considerable, long-term interests in SA that could be threatened by this move.

With two-way trade averaging $2-billion annually, there are, according to Taipei, around 450 factories owned by Taiwanese entrepreneurs in SA employing some 40,000 people. Many of these are located in smaller towns, and there are also a large number in neighbouring Lesotho. The balance of trade volumes is, unlike the trade with China, 2:1 in SA’s favour.

Entrepreneur-led growth

Third, these interests could — and should — increase, given not only that Taiwan is a market leader in sectors from which SA would like to benefit, but also the nature of Taiwanese growth, bottom-up, entrepreneur-led and less dependent on the state than the Chinese top-down, state-led alternative, the likes of which have failed dismally in Africa. This difference is more acute under Xi, who has increased state control of the economy by putting first the interests of the Chinese Communist Party.

Growth in Taiwan today is driven by a critical mass of inventors, entrepreneurs and skilled workers rather than government directives, reflecting its society’s democratic, open and innovative character. The semiconductor industry is a modern example of entrepreneurship in creating an ecosystem of innovation with universities and foreign partners.

Ninety percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors are produced in Taiwan and around 70% of the rest. Instead of buckling under the pressure from China, just 180km across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has grown stronger and more sophisticated over the last 75 years, exhibiting what has been described as “performance through paranoia” in being aware of the existential costs of failure, succeeding not despite its vulnerability, but because of it.

The lesson of Taiwan’s transformation for a country closer to the economic size of SA — at $377-billion compared to Taiwan’s $775-billion and China’s $18-trillion — is apt, where there is not the scale or resources which encourage the Chinese state-driven path. The top-down Chinese state as opposed to the bottom-up Taiwanese entrepreneurship model described by the UK politician Tom Tugendhat as one of “systematic excellence”, explains why Beijing can build the world’s largest network of high-speed rail but battles to produce the most advanced chips.

Centralised control has its limits, especially when it subordinates tech entrepreneurs to the national (for which read, party) interest. As Tugendhat observes, “Xi’s insistence that business serves the state, supports the CCP and knows its place has made innovators keep their heads down or leave the country.”

Even if SA was not to benefit immediately from the higher end of the tech spectrum, there is plenty of shorter-term potential upside at a time when a number of Taiwanese entrepreneurs are considering relocating out of China given the ramping costs and deteriorating investor conditions.

Many countries are competing to attract Taiwanese investment. In recent years India, Vietnam and Mexico have become the biggest beneficiaries, successfully attracting Taiwanese businesses to set up factories in their countries. Dirco’s diplomatic move is hardly likely to encourage them to look closely at SA as an alternative.

A choice between the ways of the East and West by the Bentley socialists in Pretoria is being made amidst a grand irony, since the East turned West to create its own prosperity.

A fourth reason to leave things as they are is that Pretoria’s move is not being made to forestall an attempt by Taiwan to request a change in SA’s one China policy. Worldwide there are 112 similar offices in 58 countries maintaining Taiwan’s foreign interests and the interests of foreigners in Taiwanese businesses.

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SA’s motivations

Finally, there is the question of timing. It is curious why SA would seek to make this move now, particularly why Dirco has renewed its efforts to do so just after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It is unlikely to improve relations with a Trump administration, which has a belligerent attitude towards Beijing anyway, and where SA has quickly slipped, too, into its sights.

Senator Ted Cruz, the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, posted on X: “The South African government seems to be going out of their way to alienate the United States and our allies. Their timeline to expel our Taiwanese allies from Pretoria is deeply troubling, undermines the national security interests of America and our allies, and will deepen tensions between the US and South Africa.”

Booting Taiwan out of Pretoria can only be explained by SA having one or more of three goals in mind.

First, this makes sense if SA wants to please China, given its relationship in BRICS, and is willing to risk the downside implicit in this relationship, both at home and abroad, including in the relationship with a Washington already on the warpath.

If so, this would amount to a cocktail of diplomatic recklessness and economic nihilism. It is questionable whether China is a strategic partner at a moment when much of the West (with which the bulk of SA’s trade and investment occurs) views Beijing as a strategic threat, at a tactical level disrupting the internet, hacking energy systems and conducting industrial espionage; while at a strategic level working with allies to smash the rules-based international order rather than finding the means to flourish within it (just as China has done), makes little sense.

“If the question is which countries’ intelligence services cause the most aggravation to the UK,” said Ken McCallum, director-general of the UK Security Service (MI5), “in October 2020, the answer is Russia. If, on the other hand, the question is which state will be shaping our world across the next decade, presenting big opportunities and big challenges for the UK, the answer is China. You might think in terms of the Russian intelligence services providing bursts of bad weather, while China is changing the climate.”

McCallum was speaking before the fall of Kabul or the invasion of Ukraine, but his general insight — Russia as a short-term spoiler, China as a driver of the global security environment — holds up, in that China is a centre of long-term strategic power and Russia one of short-term military potency.

A second goal would be if there were direct advantages — for party or country — in SA making this move. Why Pretoria would want to do this makes little sense. Taiwan and China are interwoven industrially. It makes little sense to make a choice, just as they have avoided a zero-sum choice.

A third goal might be to try to speed up the process of inevitable Taiwanese-Chinese rapprochement, one that is suggested by the levels of two-way trade and investment.

But why do this? The art of diplomacy with China and Taiwan has been sensibly to kick the can down the road and not allow Beijing to force you to make a decision and turn their national problem into yours.

China has become a diplomatic leader in hassling and ranting at those who disagree with its worldview. Just ask the DA’s Ivan Meyer. Instead of Deng Xiaoping’s preferred policy of “hide and bide” — hide your strength and bide your time — the ambition of China’s diplomats has grown along with their country’s economic station, to resemble now a practice of “tirade and contend”.

Pretoria may have sniffed a waft of  “wolf warrior diplomacy”, named after action movies portraying the People’s Liberation Army as Hollywood heroes.

In the cold light of day, forcing Taiwan to close its office in Pretoria is a cheap and silly tactical move for a misplaced strategic goal. Pretoria’s mandarins should think about whose interests they are employed to represent and think again.