Forty-nine lawmakers from 24 countries gathered in Taiwan on Tuesday to discuss how China is raising tensions with the democratically ruled island and to assess the economic impact a potential conflict could have on the international community.
The two-day summit was organized by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC, a group that includes hundreds of lawmakers from 35 countries who are concerned about how democracies deal with China. The conference brought the largest-ever foreign parliamentary delegation to Taiwan.
In a keynote speech Tuesday, Taiwan President Lai Ching-te said China’s threat to any country is a threat to the world.
“Taiwan will do everything in its power to support the ‘democracy umbrella’ with its democratic partners, so as to protect them from the threat of authoritarian expansion,” he told attending lawmakers.
The rare meeting that has brought so many lawmakers from across the globe to Taiwan is part of a trend of foreign visits that has surged since former U.S. House speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island in August almost two years ago.
Despite having its own army, currency and democratic political system of government, Taiwan is not a member of the United Nations and has few formal diplomatic allies. China opposes any international engagement with Taiwan, which it regards as a part of its territory, and has been whittling away at the number of countries that have official ties with the island. Taiwan currently has 12 diplomatic allies.
In response to the surge in international attention and visits, China has carried out a series of major military exercises around the island over the past two years and almost daily military harassment that has included a mix of fighter jets, naval and coast guard vessels and drones. It has also amped up its rhetoric that unification is inevitable.
UN Resolution 2758
At Tuesday’s conference, attending lawmakers adopted a model motion they say will pave the way for them to pass similar resolutions in their parliaments at home. The aim of the motion is to counter China’s interpretation of United Nations Resolution 2758 in their legislatures.
U.N. Resolution 2758 was passed on Oct. 25, 1971 and is a key international agreement that Beijing uses to isolate Taiwan. Experts note, however, that the resolution only decided that the People’s Republic of China would replace the Republic of China, Taiwan’s official name, as a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. It did not, however, determine Taiwan’s sovereign status.
While some countries, such as the United States, have rejected China’s claim that the U.N. resolution supports its sovereignty claim over Taiwan, some foreign lawmakers attending the summit say the model resolution adopted by IPAC members could inform governments about the possibility of China using its interpretation of the U.N. resolution as a pretext to launch a potential military attack against Taiwan.
“We see the danger of China’s false interpretation of [the U.N. resolution] as bolstering the pretext for legality of any future attack or coercion against Taiwan, so we think talking about this issue will help bring the potential danger onto the radar of different governments,” Reinhard Butikofer, former chairman of the European Parliament’s delegation for relations with the People’s Republic of China, told VOA on the sideline of the summit.
Cost of conflict
On Tuesday, the summit also focused on the impact a potential conflict over Taiwan could have on countries around the world. Building on a campaign called “Operation Mist” that IPAC launched last September, the alliance hopes to push more governments to conduct assessments of the economic impact of a potential Taiwan Strait crisis on their countries. The Taiwan Strait is the body of water that separates Taiwan and China.
“There is a strong desire among IPAC members to continue this operation because they believe people in their countries need to know the economic impact of a potential Taiwan Strait crisis,” Luke de Pulford, the executive director of IPAC, told VOA in Taipei.
Ahead of Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections earlier this year, Bloomberg Economics estimated that a conflict between China and Taiwan would decimate the global economy, costing as much as $10 trillion, which is equal to about 10% of the world’s GDP.
Pressuring IPAC
While the IPAC summit sought to raise international awareness of Taiwan’s plight, at least eight lawmakers from six countries, including Bolivia, Slovakia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, said they had received calls or texts from Chinese diplomats urging them not to attend the conference.
According to an Associated Press report, some lawmakers received texts from Chinese diplomats asking whether they planned to attend IPAC’s annual summit in Taiwan while one lawmaker said Chinese diplomats asked the head of her political party to stop her from participating in the conference.
Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry condemned Beijing’s “despicable act” in a statement while de Pulford of IPAC said the Chinese government’s pressure campaign is simply “illegitimate.”
“The communications were not through formal diplomatic channels, but rather, they were harassing text messages and phone calls from junior Chinese attaches who felt that they could tell these lawmakers where they couldn’t travel to,” he told VOA.
IPAC has faced repeated pressure from the Chinese government since its founding in 2020. Some members of the group have been sanctioned by the Chinese government while an indictment from the U.S. Justice Department showed that other IPAC members have been targeted by Chinese state-sponsored hackers.
In response to questions from VOA, the Chinese Embassy in Washington urged foreign lawmakers attending the summit to “stop exploiting the Taiwan question to interfere in China’s internal affairs and political manipulation for selfish gains.”
“The Taiwan question is one hundred percent China’s internal affair, which no foreign forces have the right to interfere in,” the Chinese Embassy’s spokesperson Liu Pengyu told VOA in a written statement.
Opportunity for international engagement
Some experts say that while Taiwan’s attempts to engage with other countries usually face strong opposition from China, the summit is an important diplomatic channel for Taipei.
“The significance of this meeting is that these are elected lawmakers who are intended to meet, talk, and discuss Taiwan and bring what they learn [in Taipei] back to their parliaments, with the hope of having concrete proposals of what can be done to help mitigate the odds of conflict happening in the Taiwan Strait and the odds of diminishing China’s aggression in this part of the world,” said Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University.
Taiwan should use the summit to highlight the challenges it faces and how the threat from China affects Taiwan’s domestic politics, he added.
“Taiwan needs to make sure that lawmakers at the summit are aware of what it means for Taiwan to exist in today’s world and what it means to be contested by China,” Nachman told VOA by phone.
De Pulford from IPAC said he believes the summit in Taiwan could have an impact on how some countries engage with Taiwan.
“A lot of the people attending the summit have strong relationships with their own governments, so they are able to leverage their own positions to pave the way for precedents such as ministerial meetings between Taiwan and other countries,” he told VOA.
